When Cadwallader got back to the camp the next morning, he heard much he was unprepared for; for news travels fast where happenings are few. What he heard did not tend to make his Christmas a merry one.
Evaleen Blaine and Hume Sherwood were now man and wife! He did not want to believe it, yet he felt it was true. And Sherwood had sent to the mint (from the “Spencer” mine, too,) the largest shipment of bullion that had ever gone out of the county! Neither did he want to believe this—and did not. There must be some mistake.
He went over to the express office through the snow and the cold; for the rain had turned to snow and the Nevada winter had begun. It would be a cheerless yule-tide for him. It was true as he had heard—true in all particulars, except that the consignment to the mint had been in gold dust, not in bullion.
Elwyn Cadwallader knew mines. Therefore he knew ledges do not produce gold dust; and Sherwood had owned no placers. Whatever suspicion he had of the truth he kept to himself. It was enough for him to know that all he had done to make Hume Sherwood the butt of the camp, that he might all the more surely part him from Evaleen Blaine, had been but the means of aiding him in winning her; and that the richest joke of the camp had proved to be rich indeed, in that it had placed a great fortune in the hands of “the deckel-edged tenderfoot.”
And here ends “The Loom of the Desert,” as written by Idah Meacham Strobridge, with cover design and illustrations made by L. Maynard Dixon, and published by the Artemisia Bindery, which is in Los Angeles, California, at the Sign of the Sagebrush; and completed on the Twelfth day of December, One thousand nine hundred and seven.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.