The moon was rising when they reached the summit of the pass, and Hobart pointed down the farther slope to a dark mass hugging the steep mountain side.
“That is the Hoopoee shaft house,” he said. “The railroad is just below it. Got matches and cigars?”
“Yes, both.”
“Then I’ll go back from here. Good-bye, old fellow, and God bless you! Tie your courage in a hard knot, and let me hear from you.”
Brant grasped his friend’s hand and wrung it in silence. He tried to speak, but the words tripped each other.
“Never mind,” Hobart broke in. “I know what you want to say, and can’t. It is nothing more than you would have done if the saddle had been on the other horse. And about your—the woman: I’ll do whatever you could do, if you stayed. Now, then, down you go, or you’ll miss your train. Good-bye.”
CHAPTER II
THE VINTAGE OF ABI-EZER
It is not always given to prescience, friendly or other, to reap where it has sown; or to the worthiest intention to see of the travail of its soul and be satisfied. But if the time, place, and manner of Brant’s sequestration had been foreordained from the beginning, the conditions could scarcely have been more favourable for bulwark building between an evil past and some hopeful future of better promise.
The new mining district to which Hobart’s suggestion sent him was a sky-land wilderness unpeopled as yet, save by a few pioneer prospectors; his fellow-measurer of mining claims was a zealot of his profession, who was well content to take his friend’s friend at his friend’s valuation, asking no questions; and the work itself was such a fierce struggle with Nature in her ruggedest aspect as to afford a very opiate of antidotes to reflection, reminiscent or forecasting.
So it came about that the heart-hardening past with its remorseful reminders withdrew more and more into the dimnesses of willing forgetfulness, and the bulwark between that which had been and that which might be grew with the uncalendared days and nights till it bade fair in time to shut out some of the remorseful vistas.