Once again in the carriage they were soon clear of the last straggling shanty, and speeding along the pale, ascending road. The silence that held the trio before their arrival at Rocky Bar again fell on them. Wrapped in overcoats and rugs, Bill Cannon appeared to slumber, every now and then—as the wheels jolted over a piece of rough road-bed—shaken into growling wakefulness. McVeigh also rolled sleepily in his seat, occasionally leaning sidewise to spit over the wheel. Only the girl seemed alert and wide-awake, her face craning out from the shadowed back seat, her eyes strained to pierce the obscurity and see for the first time the landscape of foot-hill California, of which her father had so often told her.
Now it was all a dark, formless background of broken blacknesses, where the light, open spaces of fields alternated with blotches of woods and trees. At intervals they passed a lone cabin, solitary in its pale clearing, the red eye of a stove sending a gleam through an uncurtained pane. Once they woke the echoes in the single street of a tiny town, sleeping behind its shuttered windows. Dogs barked, the shout of a belated reveler rose from a congeries of gaudily-bright doorways, and over all, imposing its mighty voice on the silence, came the roar of the stamp-mill on the hill above. It rose into the night like a fortress, a black mass looming from the slant of vast dumps, lines of lit windows puncturing its sides. The thunder of its stamps was loud on the night, fierce and insistent, like the roar of a monster round whose feet the little town cowered.
McVeigh looked back over his shoulder, saw the bright eyes under the hat-brim, and said softly,
“The Silver Crescent stamp-mill. The last big mine we’ll see.”
It was the last town they passed; even the groups of buildings that marked embryo mines grew rare. The dimly-seen country became wilder, seemed to shake off the signs of man’s encroachment and to be sweeping up into mountain majesty. The ascending road crept along the edges of ravines whence the sound of running water came in a clear clinking, dived down into black caverns of trees unlighted by the feeblest ray of star-shine, and then climbed in slow, laborious loops the bare bulwarks of the mountain. Had the girl been able to see plainly she would have noticed the change in the foliage, the disappearance of the smaller shrubs and delicate interlacement of naked boughs, and the mightier growth of the pines, soaring shafts devoid of branches to a great height. Boulders appeared among their roots, straight falls of rock edged the road like the walls of a fort.
McVeigh turned again, and again caught the bright eye.
“Seems like your paw must think a lot of what he’s heard about the new strike at Greenhide to come all this way,” he whispered.
“I guess he does,” came the response in the same key.
“It sort of stumps me to know why you came along with him,” he continued, his eyes on the horses, but leaning back to catch her answer.
“Mightn’t I just want to see the country?”