[CHAPTER I. The Clerk of the Golden Eagle]
[CHAPTER II. Marshall Haney Changes Heart]
[CHAPTER III. Bertha Yields to Temptation]
[CHAPTER IV. Haney Meets an Avenger]
[CHAPTER V. Bertha's Upward Flight]
[CHAPTER VI. The Haney Palace]
[CHAPTER VII. Bertha Repulses an Enemy]
[CHAPTER VIII. Bertha Receives an Invitation]
[CHAPTER IX. Bertha Meets Ben Fordyce]
[CHAPTER X. Ben Fordyce Calls on Horseback]
[CHAPTER XI. Ben Becomes Adviser to Mrs. Haney]
[CHAPTER XII. Alice Heath Has a Vision]
[CHAPTER XIII. Bertha's Yellow Cart]
[CHAPTER XIV. The Jolly Send-off]
[CHAPTER XV. Mart's Visit to His Sister]
[CHAPTER XVI. A Dinner and a Play]
[CHAPTER XVII. Bertha Becomes a Patron of Art]
[CHAPTER XVIII. Bertha's Portrait is Discussed]
[CHAPTER XIX. The Farther East]
[CHAPTER XX. Bertha Meets Manhattan]
[CHAPTER XXI. Bertha Makes a Promise]
[CHAPTER XXII. The Serpent's Coil]
[CHAPTER XXIII. Bertha's Flight]
[CHAPTER XXIV. The Haneys Return to the Peaks]
[CHAPTER XXV. Bertha's Decision]
[CHAPTER XXVI. Alice Visits Haney]
[CHAPTER XXVII. Marshall Haney's Sentence]
[CHAPTER XXVIII. Virtue Triumphs]
[CHAPTER XXIX. Marshall Haney's Last Trail]
MONEY MAGIC
CHAPTER I
THE CLERK OF THE GOLDEN EAGLE
Sibley Junction is in the sub-tropic zone of Colorado. It lies in a hot, dry, but immensely productive valley at an altitude of some four thousand feet above the sea, a village laced with irrigating ditches, shaded by big cotton-wood-trees, and beat upon by a genial, generous-minded sun. The boarders at the Golden Eagle Hotel can sit on the front stoop and see the snow-filled ravines of the mountains to the south, and almost hear the thunder crashing round old Uncompahgre, even when the broad leaves above their heads are pulseless and the heat of the mid-day light is a cataract of molten metal.
It is, as I have said, a productive land, for upon this ashen, cactus-spotted, repellent flat men have directed the cool, sweet water of the upper world, and wherever this life-giving fluid touches the soil grass and grain spring up like magic.
For all its wild and beautiful setting, Sibley is now a town of farmers and traders rather than of miners. The wagons entering the gates are laden with wheat and melons and peaches rather than with ore and giant-powder, and the hotels are frequented by ranchers of prosaic aspect, by passing drummers for shoes and sugars, and by the barbers and clerks of near-by shops. It is, in fact, a bit of slow-going village life dropped between the diabolism of Cripple Creek and the decay of Creede.
Nevertheless, now and then a genuine trailer from the heights, or cow-man from the mesas, does drop into town on some transient business and, with his peculiar speech and stride, remind the lazy town-loafers of the vigorous life going on far above them. Such types nearly always put up at the Eagle Hotel, which was a boarding-house advanced to the sidewalk of the main street and possessing a register.