“Oh, how awful she looks!” cried the young woman as she caught sight of the white face against his shoulder. “What are you going to do with her?”
“Take her upstairs now, and then get a doctor and get her cured, and when she’s well, marry her.”
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER I
THE PRIMA DONNA
“And thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness.”
—Omar Khayyam.
The plant of the Silver Star Mine lay scattered along the edge of a mountain river on the site of one of the camps of forty-nine. Where the pioneers had scratched the surface with their picks, their successors had torn wounds in the Sierra’s mighty flank. Where once the miners’ shouts had broken the quiet harmonies of stirred pine boughs, and singing river, the throb of engines now beat on the air, thick with the dust, noisy with the strife of toiling men.
It was a morning in the end of May. The mountain wall was dark against the rising sun; tall fir and giant pine stood along its crest in inky silhouette thrown out by a background of gold leaf. Here and there, far and aërial in the clear, cool dawn, a white peak of the high Sierra floated above the shadows, a rosy pinnacle. The air was chill and faintly touched with woodland odors. The expectant hush of Nature awaiting the miracle of sunrise, held this world of huge, primordial forms, grouped in colossal indifference round the swarm of men who delved in its rock-ribbed breast.
In the stillness the camp’s awakening movements rose upon the morning air with curious distinctness. Through the blue shadows in which it swam the tall chimneys soared aloft, sending their feathers of smoke up to the new day. It lay in its hollow like a picture, all transparent washes of amethyst and gray, overlaid by clear mountain shadows. The world was in this waiting stage of flushed sky and shaded earth when the superintendent’s wife pushed open the door of her house and with the cautious tread of one who fears to wake a sleeper, stepped out on the balcony.