XIII
A YEAR AFTER
Winter had come and gone; spring had passed into a new summer. In the prosperous township of Lost Shoe Creek no one would have recognized the god-forsaken camp of the year before. While the locality was generally condemned as an auriferous proposition, its situation fitted it admirably for base of supplies to other creeks: Abe Lincoln, Jubilee, Old Glory and Princess May, where hydraulic machinery had been established and placer claims were being worked with profitable, if not phenomenal, results.
Some critics attributed the marvelous transformation that had taken place to the presence of women, dating from the arrival of Evelyn and her party; others to the gospel tidings of good-will brought by Parson Maclane, when, wild rose in buttonhole, and followed by his dogs, Telegraph and Wrangel, he came running on the trail. A third faction was for giving the credit to law and order, personified by the ubiquitous young soldier, Sergeant Scarlett, and his right-hand man, Barney. But the wise set it down to the trinity of saving influences.
For Evelyn the time had been one of unusual happiness. Learning early that the boundless wealth of which she supposed herself possessor was not a popular subject among folk to whom daily bread came hardly, she wisely decided to omit mention of it from her conversation. Also, finding herself likely to be embarrassed for ready money, since credit was denied her, she followed Scarlett's excellent advice to try roughing it, with excellent results. Moreover, at the suggestion of the good Graysons, whose neighborliness she soon learned to value, and loyally backed by the "boys," she opened a real-estate office at Lost Shoe Creek, with a branch at Perdu, showing herself an admirable business woman. Amateur theatricals, concerts, and ice-carnivals had brightened the dark season, when mining-camps in the North are as desert islands, cut off from all communication with the outside; and for the first time in her life Evelyn tasted the unalloyed pleasure that springs from giving pleasure and helpfulness that money cannot buy. One sorrow only dimmed her sky: the continued absence of her father. No one told her that, far and wide, official search was being made for Matthew Durant, nicknamed Lucky, who, on a fateful day of the previous summer had disappeared as utterly as had the earth in which he worked opened to engulf him; she still believed, uncontradicted, that his vast interests were detaining him somewhere among the baffling distances of snow-capped hills, and that any hour that suited him would bring him back to her.
THE UBIQUITOUS YOUNG SOLDIER, SERGEANT SCARLETT.
It was the day when, by the most lovable of paradoxes, in that region, two festivals—one of independence declared, one of allegiance covenanted—are celebrated, with crossed flags: Dominion Day and the Fourth of July, in one.