CHAPTER I
THE PROSPECTOR
For five years he had journeyed back and forth between the little desert station on the Mojave and the range to the north. The townspeople paid scant attention to him. He was simply another "desert rat" obsessed with the idea that gold was to be found in those northern hills. He bought supplies and paid grudgingly. No one knew his name.
The prospector was much younger than he appeared to be. The desert sun had dried his sinews and warped his shoulders. The desert wind had scrawled thin lines of age upon his face. The desert solitude had stooped him with its awesome burden of brooding silence.
Slowly his mind had been squeezed dry of all human interest save the recurrent memory of a child's face—that, and the poignant memory of the child's mother. For ten years he had been trying to forget. The last five years on the desert had dimmed the woman's visioned face as the child came more often between him and the memory of the mother, in his dreams.
Then there were voices, the voices of strange spirits that winged through the dusk of the outlands and hovered round his fire at night.
One voice, soft, insistent, ravished his imagination with visions of illimitable power and peace and rest. "Gold! Lost gold!" it would whisper as he sat by the meager flame. Then he would tremble and draw nearer the warmth. "Where?" he would ask, tempting the darkness as a child, fearfully certain of a reply.
Then another voice, cadenced like the soft rush of waves up the sand, would murmur, "Somewhere away! Somewhere away! Somewhere away!" And in the indefiniteness of that answer he found an inexplicable joy. The vagueness of "Somewhere away" was as vast with pregnant possibilities as his desert. His was the eternity of hope, boundless and splendid in its extravagant promises. Drunk with the wine of dreams, he knew himself to be a monarch, a monarch uncrowned and unattended, yet always with his feet upon the wide threshold of his kingdom.
Then would come the biting chill of night, the manifold rays of stars and silence, silence reft of winds, yet alive with the tense immobility of the crouching beast, waiting ... waiting....