ounded only the moanings of despair, now the banks of Yellow Creek
rang with laughter and joyous voices, bragging, hoping, jesting. One
and all saw their long-dimmed hopes looming bright in the prospect of
fulfilment.

Then came a change. Just at first it was hardly noticeable. But it
swiftly developed, and the shrewd mind of the watcher in the hills
realized that the days of halcyon were passing all too swiftly. Men
were no longer satisfied with hopes. They wanted realities.

To want the realities with their simple, unrestrained passions, and
the means of obtaining them at their disposal, was to demand them. To
demand them was to have them. They wanted a saloon. They wanted an
organized means of gambling, they wanted a town, with all its means of
satisfying appetites that had all too long hungered for what they
regarded as the necessary pleasures of life. They wanted a means of
spending the accumulations gleaned from the ample purse of mother
Nature. And, in a moment, they set about the work of possessing these
things.

As is always the case the means was not far to seek. It needed but one
mind, keener in self-interest than the rest, and that mind was to
hand. Beasley Melford, at no time a man who cared for the physical
hardships of the life of these people, saw his opportunity and
snatched it. He saw in it a far greater gold-mine than his own claim
could ever yield him, and he promptly laid his plans.

He set to work without any noise, any fuss. He was too foxy to shout
until his purpose was beyond all possibility of failure. He simply
disappeared from the camp for a week. His absence was noted, but no
one cared. They were too full of their own affairs. The only people
who thought on the matter were the Padre and Buck. Nor did they speak
of it until he had been missing four days. Then it was, one evening as
they were returning from their traps, the Padre gave some inkling of
what had been busy in his thoughts all day.

"It's queer about Beasley," he said, pausing to look back over a great
valley out of which they had just climbed, and beyond which the
westering sun was shining upon the distant snow-fields.

Buck turned sharply at the sound of his companion's voice. They were
not given to talking much out on these hills.

"He's been away nigh four days," he said, and took the opportunity of
shifting his burden of six freshly-taken fox pelts and lighting his
pipe.

The Padre nodded.

"I think he'll be back s