cGill was loved, and, once his townsmen
had recovered from their amazement, they did their best to show his wife
courtesies, which all went to strengthen her belief in his importance
and to add to her complacence.

McGill was ashamed of his cabin at first, but she surprised him with the
business-like manner in which she went about fixing it up. Before his
admiring eyes she transformed it by a few deft touches into what seemed
to him a paradise. Heretofore he had witnessed women's handiwork only
from a distance, and had never possessed a real home, so this was
another wonder that it took time to appreciate. Eventually he pulled
himself together and settled down to his affairs, but in the midst of
his tasks it would sometimes come over him with a blinding rush that he
was married, that he had a wife who was no squaw, but a white woman,
more beautiful than any dream-creature, and so young that he might have
been her father. The amazing strangeness of it never left him.

But the adolescence of Ophir was short. It quickly outgrew its age of
fictitious values, and its rapturous delusions vanished as hole after
hole was put to bed-rock and betrayed no pay. Entire valleys that were
formerly considered rich were abandoned, and the driving snows erased
the signs of human effort. Men came in out of the hills cursing the luck
that had brought them there. The gold-bearing area narrowed to a proved
creek or two where the ground was taken and where there were ten men for
every job; the saloons began to fill with idlers who talked much, but
spent nothing. One day the camp awakened to the fact that it was a
failure. There is nothing more ghastly than a broken mining-town, for in
place of the first feverish exhilaration there is naught but the wreck
of hopes and the ruin of ambitions.

McGill's wife was not the last to appreciate the truth; she saw it
coming even earlier than the rest. Once she had lost the first glamour
and fully attuned herself to the new life she was sufficiently
perceptive to realize her great mistake. But McGill did not notice the
change and saw nothing to worry about in the town's affairs. He had been
poor most of his life, and his rare periods of opulence had ended
briefly, therefore this failure meant merely another trial. Ophir had
given him his prize, greater than all the riches of its namesake, and
who could be other than happy with a wife like his? His very optimism,
combined with her own fierce disappointm