XLVI. WASTED TIME
XLVII. A TRIBUTE TO THE DESERT

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

He Proceeded to Pan from a Dozen Different
Places in the Cove . . . . Frontispiece [missing from book]

His Hold Was Giving Way

The Angry Miner Lurching in Closer to Shoot [missing from book]

"Don't You Want to Give This Man a Chance?"

Beth Felt Her Heart Begin New Gymnastics [missing from book]

No Corpse Snatched from Its Grave Could Have
Been More Helplessly Inert

"Yesh, He's Broke the Law"

Till the Mechanism Burst, He would Chase His
Man Across the Desert [missing from book]

THE FURNACE OF GOLD

CHAPTER I

PRINCE OR BANDIT

Now Nevada, though robed in gray and white--the gray of sagebrush and the
white of snowy summits--had never yet been accounted a nun when once
again the early summer aroused the passions of her being and the wild
peach burst into bloom.

It was out in Nauwish valley, at the desert-edge, where gold has been
stored in the hungry-looking rock to lure man away from fairer pastures.
There were mountains everywhere--huge, rugged mountains, erected in the
igneous fury of world-making, long since calmed. Above them all the sky
was almost incredibly blue--an intense ultramarine of extraordinary
clearness and profundity.

At the southwest limit of the valley was the one human habitation
established thereabout in many miles, a roadside station where a spring
of water issued from the earth. Towards this, on the narrow, side-hill
road, limped a dusty red automobile.

It contained three passengers, two women and a man. Of the women, one
was a little German maid, rather pretty and demure, whose duty it was to
enact the chaperone. The other, Beth Kent, straight from New York City,
well--the wild peach was in bloom!

She was amazingly beautiful and winning. It seemed as if she and not the
pink mountain blossoms must be responsible for all that haunting
redolence in this landscape of passionless gray. Her brown eyes burned
with glorious luminosity. Her color pulsed with health and the joyance
of existence. Her red lips quivered with unuttered ecstacies that surged
in the depths of her nature. Even the bright brown strands of her hair,
escaping the prison of her cap, were catching the sunlight and flinging
it off in the most engaging animation. She loved this new, unpeopled
land--the mountains, the sky, the vastness of it all!

For a two-fold reason she had come from New