oon waned, the sun sank, twilight crept over the barren
waste. There were no sounds but the seep of sand, the moan of wind,
the mourn of wolf. Loneliness came with the night that mantled Beauty
Stanton's grave. Shadows trooped in from the desert and the darkness
grew black. On that slope the wind always blew, and always the sand
seeped, dusting over everything, imperceptibly changing the surface
of the earth. The desert was still at work. Nature was no respecter of
graves. Life was nothing. Radiant, cold stars blinked pitilessly out of
the vast blue-black vault of heaven. But there hovered a spirit beside
this woman's last resting-place--a spirit like the night, sad, lonely,
silent, mystical, immense.

And as it hovered over hers so it hovered over other nameless graves.

In the eternal workshop of nature, the tenants of these unnamed and
forgotten graves would mingle dust of good with dust of evil, and by the
divinity of death resolve equally into the elements again.

The place that had known Benton knew it no more. Coyotes barked dismally
down what had been the famous street of the camp and prowled in and out
of the piles of debris and frames of wood. Gone was the low, strange
roar that had been neither music nor mirth nor labor. Benton remained
only a name.

The sun rose upon a squalid scene--a wide flat area where stakes and
floors and frames mingled with all the flotsam and jetsam left by a
hurried and profligate populace, moving on to another camp. Daylight
found no man there nor any living creature. And all day the wind blew
the dust and sheets of sand over the place where had reigned such strife
of toil and gold and lust and blood and death. A train passed that day,
out of which engineer and fireman gazed with wondering eyes at what had
been Benton. Like a mushroom it had arisen, and like a dust-storm on
the desert wind it had roared away, bearing its freight of labor, of
passion, and of evil. Benton had become a name--a fabulous name.

But nature seemed more merciful than life. For it began to hide what man
had left--the scars of habitations where hell had held high carnival.
Sunset came, then night and the starlight. The lonely hours were winged,
as if in a hurry to resolve back into the elements the flimsy remains of
that great camp.

And that spot was haunted.

29

Casey left Benton on the work-train. It was composed of a long string
of box--and flat-cars loaded with stone, iron, gravel, ties-