empty bottles,
fully ten feet high--enough to build a little church.

Drawn onward by the novelty of all the scene, Beth crossed the main
street--already teeming with horses, wagons, and men--and proceeded
over towards a barren hill, followed demurely by her maid. The hill
was like a torn-up battlefield, trenched, and piled with earthworks of
defense, for man the impetuous had already flung up great gray dumps of
rock, broken and wrenched from the bulk of the slope, where he quested
for gleaming yellow metal. He had ripped out the adamant--the matrix
of the gold--for as far as Beth could see. Like ant-heaps of
tremendous dimensions stood these monuments of toil--rock-writings,
telling of the heat and desire, the madness of man to be rich.

The world about was one of rocks and treeless ridges, spewed from some
vast volcanic forge of ages past. It was all a hard, gray, adamantine
world, unlovely and severe--a huge old gold furnace, minus heat or
fire, lying neglected in a universe of mountains that might have been a
workshop in the ancient days when Titans wrought their arts upon the
earth.

Beth gazed upon it all in wonder not unmingled with awe. What a place
it was for man to live and wage his puny battles! Yet the fever of all
of it, rising in her veins, made her eager already to partake of the
dream, the excitement that made mere gold-slaves of the men who had
come here compelling this forbidding place to yield up some measure of
comfort and become in a manner their home.

Van, in the meanwhile, having spent the time till midnight on his feet,
and the small hours asleep on a bale of hay, was early abroad, engaged
in various directions. He first proceeded to the largest general store
in the camp and ordered a generous bill of supplies to be sent to his
newest claim. Next he arranged with a friendly teamster for the prompt
return of the two borrowed horses on which Beth and her maid had come
to camp. Then, on his way to an assayer's office, where samples of
rock from the claim in question had been left for the test of fire, he
encountered a homely, little, dried-up woman who was scooting about
from store to store with astonishing celerity of motion.

"Tottering angels!" said he. "Mrs. Dick!"

"Hello--just a minute," said the lively little woman, and she dived
inside the newest building and was out almost immediately with a great
sack of plunder that she jerked about with most diverting energy.

"Here,