“Will you work for me for an hour or so,” said the girl as the night man entered the office. Of course he would, but he was disappointed. His life in the camp had been a lonely one till this beautiful woman came to work in the office. He had dropped in two hours ahead of time just to live in the sunshine of her presence.
“There’s a tip for you,” she said as she flipped the top ten from the stack of yellows in front of the operator, dropped the other six into her hand-bag and jumped out into the night.
“Here I am again,” she laughed as she opened my door. “I want you to put that in your safe till morning;” and she planked sixty dollars in gold, down on my desk.
“Bless you, Miss Parsons,” said I, “we don’t keep such a thing. We always owe the other fellow, but I’ll give it to Vaughan, he doesn’t drink.”
“I want you and Harry to go with me,” she said, “and ask no questions. Put on your overcoats, there are three good horses waiting at the door.”
In thirty minutes from that time, our horses were toiling up the Last Chance trail, and in an hour, we stood on the summit of Bachelor, eleven thousand feet above the sea.
The scene was wondrously beautiful. Below, adown the steep mountain-side, lay the long, dark trail leading to the gulch where the arc lights gleamed on the trachyte cliffs. Around a bend, in the valley, came a silvery stream—the broad and beautiful Rio Grande, its crystal ripples gleaming in the soft light of a midnight moon. Away to the east, above, beyond the smaller mountains, the marble crest of the Sangre de Christo stood up above the world.
Turning from this wondrous picture I saw the horses with their riders just entering a narrow trail that lay through an aspen grove in the direction of the Bachelor mine. Harry had secured a board from the Bachelor shaft-house and was driving a stake on the Sure Thing claim when I arrived.