ned, and chasms where the thick rime of
the earth had been peeled to bed-rock. There was no worn channel for
the creek, and its waters, dammed up, diverted, flying through the air
on giddy flumes, trickling into sinks and low places, and raised by
huge water-wheels, were used and used again a thousand times. The
hills had been stripped of their trees, and their raw sides gored and
perforated by great timber-slides and prospect holes. And over all,
like a monstrous race of ants, was flung an army of men--mud-covered,
dirty, dishevelled men, who crawled in and out of the holes of their
digging, crept like big bugs along the flumes, and toiled and sweated
at the gravel-heaps which they kept in constant unrest--men, as far as
the eye could see, even to the rims of the hilltops, digging, tearing,
and scouring the face of nature.

Li Wan was appalled at the tremendous upheaval. "Truly, these men are
mad," she said to Canim.

"Small wonder. The gold they dig after is a great thing," he replied.
"It is the greatest thing in the world."

For hours they threaded the chaos of greed, Canim eagerly intent,
Li Wan weak and listless. She knew she had been on the verge
of disclosure, and she felt that she was still on the verge of
disclosure, but the nervous strain she had undergone had tired her,
and she passively waited for the thing, she knew not what, to happen.
From every hand her senses snatched up and conveyed to her innumerable
impressions, each of which became a dull excitation to her jaded
imagination. Somewhere within her, responsive notes were answering to
the things without, forgotten and undreamed-of correspondences were
being renewed; and she was aware of it in an incurious way, and her
soul was troubled, but she was not equal to the mental exultation
necessary to transmute and understand. So she plodded wearily on
at the heels of her lord, content to wait for that which she knew,
somewhere, somehow, must happen.

After undergoing the mad bondage of man, the creek finally returned to
its ancient ways, all soiled and smirched from its toil, and coiled
lazily among the broad flats and timbered spaces where the valley
widened to its mouth. Here the "pay" ran out, and men were loth to
loiter with the lure yet beyond. And here, as Li Wan paused to prod
Olo with her staff, she heard the mellow silver of a woman's laughter.

Before a cabin sat a woman, fair of skin and rosy as a child, dimpling
with glee at the words of a