ideal--my ideal. She said and did and
looked all the things I'd been missing in the others. I wanted to drop
everything and run after her."

"How absolutely idyllic!" she murmured. "And then?"

"Then I had to come down to earth with a dull, stunning swat, of course.
There were a lot of commonplace, material things waiting to be done, and
it was up to me to do them. Before I saw her, I used to think that
nothing could divide time with a man's work: that there wouldn't be any
time to divide. Afterward, I found out my mistake. Sleeping or waking,
every day and all day, she was there: and the work went on just the
same, or rather a whole lot better."

The long drive was in its final third, and the wagon track, which had
transferred itself to the top of the level railroad grade, admitted
speed. By degrees the caravan became elongated, with the president still
in the lead, the man on horseback indifferently ahead or behind, and the
other two vehicles wide apart and well to the rear. Their isolation was
complete when she said:

"Do you want me to say that I don't recognize any of the symptoms, Mr.
Ford?"

"Do I--No! Yes!--that is, I--Heavens! that is a terrible way to put it!
Of course I hope--I hope you are in love--with the right person. If
you're not, I--"

She was weeping silently; weeping because it would have been a sin to
laugh.

"You--called it a comedy a little while--ago," she faltered. "In another
minute it will be a tragedy. Don't you think we are getting too far
behind the others?"

He whipped up obediently, but the horses were in no hurry. At the
rounding of the next shouldering hill the railroad grade entered a high,
broad valley, the swelling hills on either side dotted with the dumps
and tunnel-openings of the Copah gold-diggers. Ford had not been through
the upper part of the district since the previous summer of
pathfindings, and at that time it was like a dozen other outlying and
hardly accessible fields, scantily manned and languishing under the dry
rot of isolation. But now--

He was looking curiously across at the opposing hillsides. Black dots,
dozens of them, were moving from ledge to ledge, pausing here and there
to ply pick and shovel. Now and then from some one of the dry arroyos
came the echoes of a surface shot; dynamite cartridges thrust into the
earth to clear away the drift to bed-rock. Ford called his companion's
attention to the activities.

"See what it does to a mining countr