"I was up at the claims with Tommy," Bill explained. "You can see, maybe, why I can't be away long—and why I covered up this vein."
"Oh dear!" Mrs. Hunter leaned her head on her hand as if she had become suddenly aware of a great weariness. "Must you go through all that fighting and grasping over gold? A boom always seems to me like a lot of wild animals fighting and tearing at one another, to get a bone which the first one on the hunting ground has already cleaned." She closed her eyes tightly for an instant, then looked wistfully from Doris to Bill. "I don't know but what gold costs more than it's worth, after all," she said. "And the more you have, the more terrible the price. I don't know but what I'd just about as soon see you two face poverty together, as to see you face a boom. You know," she added apologetically, "I was born in Virginia City. I've seen sudden wealth and sudden poverty. And the sudden wealth was worse, sometimes—though I never heard of a man shooting himself because he struck it rich, and they do sometimes when they lose everything."
"That's what Mr. Rayfield meant, I guess. He said if Bill had a lot of ore like the sample he saw, he'd have Bill's friends pray that wealth wouldn't spoil him." Doris smiled tolerantly at her mother, as youth is wont to smile at experience.
"Who's Rayfield?" Don Hunter pushed back his chair with a rasping sound on the bare floor. "How did he come to see a sample? Doris, you help your mother with the dishes; you ought to have a lot to talk over. Bill, come on out on the porch and let's get at the bottom of this. So far I can't make head nor tail of anything."
Out on the porch the two men smoked in silence, watching the twinkling of camp fires half a mile away, where travelers were availing themselves of running water and shade for one comfortable camp on the desert. The Hunter ranch saw many such wayfarers, for it lay close to the highway (such as it was) and formed a sort of oasis, all the more enticing because one could buy fresh eggs and milk and, if one were lucky, a loaf or two of delicious bread. Mrs. Don called such revenue her pin money, and Don himself grinned and wondered sometimes what she ever did with it.
"Who's Rayfield?" Don repeated his question abruptly, after a lapse of several minutes.
Bill told him, making few words of it but contriving to paint a very clear picture in Don's mind.
"They didn't come this way—or if they did, they didn't stop." Don seemed to consider that omission somewhat derogatory to the character of the government men.
"They didn't mention this place at all," Bill said. "I got the idea they diverged from the trail and cut towards the likeliest mineral showings. That would put them south."
"What's your plan, Bill? Or haven't you got any?" Don inspected his pipe, prodding at the tobacco with his finger. "Yuh want to cash in as soon as yuh can, I reckon—anxious for the honeymoon."