was his to
dispose of as he pleased. It had cost him ninety dollars for the night.

In his pocket he had cautiously retained a little money--seven and
one-half dollars, to be accurate. He returned to Beth, informed her of
all he had discovered concerning her brother, took herself and Elsa to
dine in the camp's one presentable restaurant, paid nearly seven
dollars for the meal, and gave what remained to the waiter.

Then Beth, who had never in her life been so utterly exhausted,
resigned herself to Elsa's care, bade Van good-night, and left him
standing in the rain before the door, gallant, and smiling to the end.

CHAPTER IX

PROGRESS AND SALT

Goldite, by the light of day, presented a wonderful spectacle. It was
a mining camp positively crystallizing into being before the very eyes
of all beholders. It was nearly all tents and canvas structures--a
heterogeneous mixture of incompleteness and modernity to which the
telegraph wires had already been strung from the outside world. It had
no fair supply of water, but it did have a newspaper, issued once a
week.

A dozen new buildings, flimsy, cheap affairs, were growing like
toadstools, day and night. Several brick buildings, and shacks of mud,
were rising side by side. Everywhere the scene was one of crowds,
activity, and hurry. Thousands of men were in the one straight street,
a roughly dressed, excited throng, gold-bitten, eager, and open-handed.
Hundreds of mules and horses, a few bewildered cows, herds of great
wagons, buggies, heaps of household goods, and trunks, with
fortifications of baled hay and grain, were crowded into two great
corrals, where dusty teamsters hastened hotly about, amidst heaps of
dusty harness, sacks of precious ore and the feed troughs for the
beasts.

Beth had slept profoundly, despite the all-night plague of noises,
penetrating vividly through the shell-like walls of the house. She was
out with Elsa at an early hour, amazingly refreshed and absorbingly
interested in all she heard and saw. The sky was clear, but a chill
wind blew down from the mountains, flapping canvas walls in all
directions.

The building wherein the women had rested was a wooden lodging house,
set barely back from the one business street of the camp. Next door
was a small, squat domicile constructed of bottles and mud. The
bottles were laid in the "mortar" with their ends protruding. Near by,
at the rear of a prosperous saloon, was a pyramid of