"New York," he said, and relapsed into silent meditation. How far away seemed old New Amsterdam! How long seemed the brief six years since he had started forth with his youthful health, his strength, determination, boyish dreams, and small inheritance to build up a fortune in the West! What a mixture of sunshine and failure it had been! What glittering hopes had lured him hither and yon in the mountains, where each great gateway of adventure had charged its heavy toll!
He had lost practically all of his money; he had gained his all of manhood. He had suffered privation and hardship; he had known the vast comfort of friends—true friends, as certain as the very heart in his breast to serve him to the end.
Like a panoramic dream he beheld a swift procession of mine-and-cattle scenes troop past for swift review. He lived again whole months of nights spent out alone beneath the sky, with the snow and the wind hurled down upon him from a merciless firmament of bleakness. Once more he stumbled blindly forward in the desert—he and Gettysburg—perishing for water, giving up their liquid souls to the horribly naked and insatiate sun. Again he toiled in the shaft of a mine till his back felt like a crackly thing of glass with each aching fissure going deeper.
Once more the gold goddess beckoned with her smile, and fortune was there, almost in reach—the fortune that he and his partners had sought so doggedly, so patiently—the fortune for which they had starved and delved and suffered—only to see it vanish in the air as the sunshine will vanish from a peak.
Old hopes, like ghosts, went skulking by, vain charlatans, ashamed. But friendships stood about in every scene—bright presences that cast a roseate glow on all the tribulations of his life. And it seemed as if a failure here was half a failure only, after all. It had not robbed him either of his youth, his strength, or a certain boyish credulity and trust in all his kind. He still believed he should win his golden goal, and he loved the land that had tried him.
His last, his biggest venture, the Monte Cristo mine was, however, gone—everything sold to meet the company debts. Nevertheless, he had once more purchased a claim, with all but his very last dollar in the world, and he and his partners would soon be on the ground, assaulting the stubborn adamant with powder, pick, and drill, in the fever of the miner's ceaseless dream.
To-day, as he rode beside the girl, he wondered at it all—why he had labored so persistently. The faint, far-off shadow of a sweetheart, long since left behind, failed to supply him a motive. She had grown impatient, listened to a suitor more tangible than Van's absent self, and so, blamelessly, had faded from his scheme of hopes, leaving no more than a fragrance in his thoughts, with certainly no bitterness or anger.
"Old New York," he repeated, at the end of his reverie, and meeting once more the steady brown eyes of the girl with whom the fates had thrown him, he fetched up promptly with the present.
"How long has your brother been out here in Goldite?"
"About a month," she answered. "He's been in the West for nearly a year, and wrote Mr. Bostwick to come."