ch require no answers and others
which answer themselves. Denver had asked Bunker what he meant when he
refused Drusilla's address and intimated that he was unworthy of her
friendship, but after a gloomy hour in the deepening twilight the
question answered itself. Bunker had taken his daughter across the
desert, on her way to the train and New York, and his curt remarks were
but the reflex of her's as she discussed Denver's many transgressions.
He thought more of mines and of his own selfish interests than he did of
her and her art, and so she desired to hear no more of him or his
protestations of innocence. That was what the words meant and as Denver
thought them over he wondered if it was not true.

Drusilla had greeted him cordially when he had returned from Globe and
had invited him to dinner that same night, but he had refused because he
needed the sleep and begrudged the daylight to take it. And the next day
he had worked even harder than before and had forgotten her invitation
entirely. She was to sing just for him and, after the singing, she would
have told him all her plans; and then perhaps they might have spoken of
other things and parted as lovers should. But no, he had spoiled it by
his senseless hurry in getting his ore off with McGraw; and now, with
all the time in the world on his hands, the valley below was silent. Not
a scale, not a trill, not a run or roulade; only silence and the frogs
with their devilish insistence, their ceaseless _eh_, _eh_,
_eh_. He rose up and heaved a stone into the creek-bed below, then
went in and turned on his phonograph.

They were real people to him now, these great artists of the discs;
Drusilla had described them as she listened to the records and even the
places where they sang. She had pictured the mighty sweep of the
Metropolitan with its horse-shoe of glittering boxes; the balconies
above and the standing-room below where the poor art-students gathered
to applaud; and he had said that when he was rich he would subscribe for
a box and come there just to hear her sing. And now he was broke, and
Drusilla was going East to run the perilous gauntlet of the tenors. He
jerked up the stylus in the middle of a record and cursed his besotted
industry. If he had let his ore go, and gone to see her like a
gentleman, Drusilla might even now be his. She might have relented and
given him a kiss--he cursed and stumbled blindly to bed.

In the morning he went to work in the close a