Chapter I: Part I: I (1)

“The shining mountains,” said Gregory Compton softly, throwing back his head, his eyes travelling along the hard bright outlines above the high valley in which his ranch lay. “The shining mountains. That is what the Indians called them before the white man came.”

His wife yawned frankly. “Pity they don’t shine inside as well as out--what we’ve got of ’em.”

“Who knows? Who knows?”

“We don’t. That’s the trouble.”

But although she spoke tartly, she nestled into his arm, for she was not unamiable, she had been married but sixteen months, and she was still fond of her husband “in a way”; moreover, although she cherished resentments open and secret, she never forgot that she had won a prize “as men go.” Many girls in Butte[A] had wanted to marry Gregory Compton, not only because he had inherited a ranch of eleven hundred and sixty acres, but because, comprehensively, he was superior to the other young men of his class. He had graduated from the High School before he was sixteen; then after three years’ work on the ranch under his unimaginative father, he had announced his intention of leaving the State unless permitted to attend the School of Mines in Butte. The old man, who by this time had taken note of the formation of his son’s jaw, gave his consent rather than lose the last of his children; and for two years and a semester Gregory had been the most brilliant figure in the School of Mines.

“Old Man Compton,” who had stampeded from his small farm in northern New York in the sixties to meet with little success in the mines, but more as a rancher, had been as typical a hayseed as ever punctuated politics with tobacco juice in front of a corner grocery-store, but had promised his wife on her death-bed that their son should have “schooling.” Mrs. Compton, who had arrived in Montana soon after the log house was built, was a large, dark, silent woman, whom none of her distant neighbours had ever claimed to know. It was currently believed in the New York village whence she came that in the early days of the eighteenth century the sturdy Verrooy stock had been abruptly crossed by the tribe of the Oneida. Ancient history in a new country is necessarily enveloped in mist, but although the children she had lost had been fair and nondescript like their father, her youngest, and her only son, possessed certain characteristics of the higher type of Indian. He was tall and lightly built, graceful, supple, swift of foot, with the soft tread of the panther; and although his skin was no darker than that of the average brunette, it acquired significance from the intense blackness of his hair, the thin aquiline nose, the long, narrow eyes, the severe and stolid dignity of expression even in his earlier years.

He had seemed to the girls of the only class he knew in Butte an even more romantic figure than the heroes of their magazine fiction, particularly as he took no notice of them until he met Ida Hook at a picnic and surrendered his heart.

Ida, forced by her thrifty mother to accept employment with a fashionable dressmaker, and consumed with envy of the “West Siders” whose measurements she took, did not hesitate longer than feminine prudence dictated. Before she gave her hair its nightly brushing her bold unpedantic hand had covered several sheets of pink note-paper with the legend, “Mrs. Gregory Compton,” the while she assured herself there was “no sweller name on West Broadway.” To do her justice, she also thrilled with young passion, for more than her vanity had responded to the sombre determined attentions of the man who had been the indifferent hero of so many maiden dreams. Although she longed to be a Copper Queen, she was too young to be altogether hard; and, now that her hour was come, every soft enchantment of her sex awoke to bind and blind her mate.

Gregory Compton’s indifference to women had been more pretended than real, although an occasional wild night on The Flat had interested him far more than picnics and dances where the girls used no better grammar than the “sporting women” and were far less amusing. He went to this picnic to please his old school friend, Mark Blake, and because Nine Mile Cañon had looked very green and alluring after the June rains when he had ridden through it alone the day before. The moment he stood before Ida Hook, staring into the baffling limpid eyes, about which heavy black lashes rose and fell and met and tangled and shot apart in a series of bedevilling manœuvres, he believed himself to be possessed by that intimate soul-seeking desire that nothing but marriage can satisfy. He kept persistently at her side, his man’s instinct prompting the little attentions women value less than they demand. He also took more trouble to interest her verbally than was normal in one whom nature had prompted to silence, and he never would learn the rudiments of small talk; but his brain was humming in time with his eager awakened pulses, and Ida was too excited and exultant to take note of his words. “It was probably about mines, anyway,” she confided to her friends, Ruby and Pearl Miller. “Nobody talks about anything else long in this old camp.”

Gregory’s infatuation was by no means reduced by the fact that no less than six young men contended for the favour of Miss Hook. She was the accredited beauty of Butte, for even the ladies of the West Side had noticed and discussed her and hoped that their husbands and brothers had not. It was true that her large oval blue-grey eyes, set like Calliope’s, were as shallow as her voice; but the lids were so broad and white, and the lashes so silky and oblique, that the critical faculty of man was drugged, if dimly prescient. Her cheeks were a trifle too full, her nose of a type unsung in marble; but what of that when her skin was as white as milk, the colour in cheek and lips of a clear transparent coral, that rarest and most seductive of nature’s reds, her little teeth enamelled like porcelain? And had she not every captivating trick, from active eyelash to the sudden toss of her small head on its long round throat, even to the dilating nostril which made her nose for the moment look patrician and thin! Her figure, too, with its boyish hips, thin flexible waist, and full low bust, which she carried with a fine upright swing, was made the most of in a collarless blouse, closely fitting skirt, and narrow dark belt.

Miss Hook, although her expression was often wide-eyed and innocent, was quite cynically aware of her power over the passions of men. More than one man of high salary or recent fortune had tried to “annex” her, as she airily put it; her self-satisfaction and the ever-present sophistications of a mining town saving her from anything so gratuitous as outraged maidenhood.

The predatory male and his promises had never tempted her, and it was her boast that she had never set foot in the road houses of The Flat. She had made up her mind long since to live on the West Side, the fashionable end of Butte, and was wise enough, to quote her own words, to know that the straight and narrow was the only direct route. Ambition, her sleepless desire to be a grand dame (which she pronounced without any superfluous accent), was stronger than vanity or her natural love of pleasure. By the ordinary romantic yearnings of her age and sex she was unhampered; but when she met Gregory Compton, she played the woman’s game so admirably the long day through that she brushed her heavy black hair at night quite satisfied he would propose when she gave him his chance. This she withheld for several days, it being both pleasant and prudent to torment him. He walked home with her every afternoon from the dressmaking establishment on North Main Street to her mother’s cottage in East Granite, to be dismissed at the gate coyly, reluctantly, indifferently, but always with a glance of startled wonder from the door.

In the course of the week she gave him to understand that she should attend the Friday Night dance at Columbia Gardens, and expected him to escort her. Gregory, who by this time was reduced to a mere prowling instinct projected with fatal instantaneity from its napping ego, was as helpless a victim as if born a fool. He thought himself the most fortunate of men to receive permission to sit beside her on the open car during the long ride to the Gardens, to pay for the greater number of her waltzes, to be, in short, her beau for the night.

The evening of Friday at Columbia Gardens is Society Night for all respectable Butte, irrespective of class; the best floor and the airiest hall in Silver Bow County proving an irresistible incentive to democracy. Moreover, Butte is a city of few resources, and the Gardens at night look like fairyland: the immense room is hung with Chinese lanterns depending from the rafters, the music is the best in Montana; and the richer the women, the plainer their frocks. A sort of informal propriety reigns, and millionaire or clerk pays ten cents for the privilege of dancing with his lady.

Ida, who had expended five of her hard-earned dollars on a bottle of imported perfume, wore a white serge suit cut as well as any in “the grand dame bunch.” After the sixth waltz she draped her head and shoulders with a coral-pink scarf and led Gregory, despite the chill of June, out to his willing fate. The park was infested by other couples, walking briskly to keep themselves warm, and so were the picnic grounds where the cottonwoods and Canadian poplars were being coaxed to grow, now that the smelters which had reduced the neighbourhood of Butte to its bones had been removed to Anaconda.

But farther up the cañon no one but themselves adventured, and here Gregory was permitted to ask this unique creature, provided with a new and maddening appeal to the senses, to renounce her kingdom and live on a ranch.

It was all very crude, even to the blatant moon, which in the thin brilliant atmosphere of that high altitude swings low with an almost impudent air of familiarity, and grins in the face of sentiment. But to Gregory, who was at heart passionate and romantic, it was a soul-quickening scene: the blazing golden disk poised on the very crest of the steep mountain before them, the murmur of water, the rustling young leaves, the deep-breasted orientally perfumed woman with the innocent wondering eyes. The moon chuckled and reminded his exacting mistress, Nature, that were he given permission to scatter some of his vast experience instead of the seductive beams that had accumulated it, this young man with his natural distinction of mind, and already educated beyond his class, would enjoy a sudden clarity of vision and perceive the defects of grammar and breeding in this elemental siren with nothing but Evian instincts to guide her.

But the dutiful old search-light merely whipped up the ancestral memories in Gregory’s subconscious brain; moreover, gave him courage. He made love with such passion and tenderness that Ida, for once elemental, clung to him so long and so ardently that the grinning moon whisked off his beam in disgust and retired behind a big black cloud--which burst shortly afterwards and washed out the car tracks.

They were married in July, and Mrs. Hook, who had worked for forty years at tub and ironing-board, moved over to the dusty cemetery in September, at rest in the belief not only that her too good-looking daughter was safely “planted,” but was a supremely happy woman.

Ida’s passion, however, had been merely a gust of youth, fed by curiosity and gratified ambition; it quickly passed in the many disappointments of her married life. Gregory had promised her a servant, but no “hired girl” could be induced to remain more than a week on the lonely De Smet Ranch; and Mrs. Compton’s temper finding its only relief in one-sided quarrels with her Chinese cooks, even the philosophical Oriental was prone to leave on a moment’s notice. There were three hired men and three in the family, after John Oakley came, to cook and “clean up” for, and there were weeks at a time when Ida was obliged to rise with the dawn and occupy her large and capable but daintily manicured hands during many hours of the day.

Gregory’s personality had kindled what little imagination she had into an exciting belief in his power over life and its corollary, the world’s riches. Also, having in mind the old Indian legend of the great chief who had turned into shining gold after death and been entombed in what was now known prosaically as the De Smet Ranch, she had expected Gregory to “strike it rich” at once.

But although there were several prospect holes on the ranch, dug by Gregory in past years, he had learned too much, particularly of geology, during his two years at the School of Mines to waste any more time digging holes in the valley or bare portions of the hills. If a ledge existed it was beneath some tangle of shrub or tree-roots, and he had no intention of denuding his pasture until he was prepared to sell his cattle.

He told her this so conclusively a month after they were married that she had begged him to raise sugar beets and build a factory in Butte (which he would be forced to superintend), reminding him that the only factory in the State was in the centre of another district and near the southern border, and that sugar ranged from six to seven dollars a hundredweight. He merely laughed at this suggestion, although he was surprised at her sagacity, for, barring a possible democratic victory, there was room for two beet-sugar factories in Montana. But he had other plans, although he gave her no hint of them, and had no intention of complicating his life with an uncongenial and exacting business.

By unceasing personal supervision he not only made the ranch profitable and paid a yearly dividend to his three aunts, according to the terms of his father’s will, but for the last two years, after replacing or adding to his stock, he had deposited a substantial sum in the bank, occasionally permitting his astute friend, Mark Blake, to turn over a few hundreds for him on the stock-market. This was the heyday of the American farmer, and the De Smet cattle brought the highest prices in the stock-yards for beef on the hoof. He also raised three crops of alfalfa a year to insure his live stock against the lean days of a Rocky Mountain winter. He admitted to Ida that he could afford to sink a shaft or drive a tunnel in one of his hills, but added that he should contemplate nothing of the sort until he had finished his long-delayed course in the School of Mines, and had thousands to throw away on development work, miners, and machinery. At this time he saw no immediate prospect of resuming the studies interrupted by the death of his father: until John Oakley came, eight months after his marriage, he knew of no foreman to trust but himself.

Ida desired the life of the city for other reasons than its luxuries and distractions. Her fallow brain was shrewd and observing, although often crude in its deductions. She soon realised that the longer she lived with her husband the less she understood him. Like all ignorant women of any class she cherished certain general estimates of men, and in her own class it was assumed that the retiring men were weak and craven, the bold ones necessarily lacking in that refinement upon which their young lady friends prided themselves. Ida had found that Gregory, bold as his wooing had been, and arrogantly masculine as he was in most things, not only had his shynesses but was far more refined and sensitive than herself. She was a woman who prided herself upon her theories, and disliked having them upset; still more not knowing where she was at, to use her own spirited vernacular. She began to be haunted by the fear of making some fatal mistake, living, as she did, in comparative isolation with him. Not only was her womanly pride involved, as well as a certain affection born of habit and possible even to the selfish, rooted as it is in the animal function of maternity, but she had supreme faith in his future success and was determined to share it.

She was tired, however, of attempting to fathom the intense reserves and peculiarities of that silent nature, of trying to live up to him. She was obliged to resort to “play-acting”; and, fully aware of her limitations, despite her keen self-appreciation, was in constant fear that she would “make a grand mess of it.” Gregory’s eyes could be very penetrating, and she had discovered that although he never told funny stories, nor appeared to be particularly amused at hers, he had his own sense of humour.

II

The young couple stood together in the dawn, the blue dawn of Montana. The sky was as cold and bright as polished silver, but the low soft masses of cloud were blue, the glittering snow on the mountain peaks was blue, the smooth snow fields on the slopes and in the valley were blue. Nor was it the blue of azure or of sapphire, but a deep lovely cool polaric blue, born in the inverted depths of Montana, and forever dissociated from art.

It was an extramundane scene, and it had drawn Gregory from his bed since childhood, but to Ida, brought up in a town, and in one whose horizons until a short while ago had always been obscured by the poisonous haze of smelters, and ores roasted in the open, it was “weird.” Novels had informed her that sunrises were pink, or, at the worst, grey. There was something mysterious in this cold blue dawn up in the snow fields, and she hated mystery. But as it appeared to charm Gregory, she played up to him when he “dragged” her out to look at it; and she endeavoured to do so this morning although her own ego was rampant.

Gregory drew her closer, for she still had the power to enthrall him at times. He understood the resources within her shallows as little as she understood his depths, but although her defects in education and natural equipment had long since appalled him, he was generally too busy to think about her, and too masculine to detect that she was playing a part. This morning, although he automatically responded to her blandishments, he was merely sensible of her presence, and his eyes, the long watchful eyes of the Indian, were concentrated upon the blue light that poured from the clouds down upon the glistening peaks. Ida knew that this meant he was getting ready to make an announcement of some sort, and longed to shake it out of him. Not daring to outrage his dignity so far, she drew the fur robe that enveloped them closer and rubbed her soft hair against his chin. It was useless to ask him to deliver himself until he was “good and ready”, but the less direct method sometimes prevailed.

Suddenly he came out with it.

“I’ve made up my mind to go back to the School.”

“Back to school--are you loony?”

“The School of Mines, of course. I can enter the Junior Class where I left off; earlier in fact, as I had finished the first semester. Besides, I’ve been going over all the old ground since Oakley came.”

“Is that what’s in all them books.”

“Those, dear.”

“Those. Mining Engineer’s a lot sweller than rancher.”

“Please don’t use that word.”

“Lord, Greg, you’re as particular as if you’d been brought up in Frisco or Chicago, instead of on a ranch.”

He laughed outright and pinched her ear. “I use a good deal of slang myself--only, there are some words that irritate me--I can hardly explain. It doesn’t matter.”

“Greg,” she asked with sudden suspicion, “why are you goin’ in for a profession? Have you given up hopes of strikin’ it rich on this ranch?”

“Oh, I shall never relinquish that dream.” He spoke so lightly that even had she understood him better she could not have guessed that the words leapt from what he believed to be the deepest of his passions. “But what has that to do with it? If there is gold on the ranch I shall be more likely to discover it when I know a great deal more about geology than I do now, and better able to mine it cheaply after I have learned all I can of milling and metallurgy at the School. But that is not the point. There may be nothing here. I wish to graduate into a profession which not only attracts me more than any other, but in which the expert can always make a large income. Ranching doesn’t interest me, and with Oakley to----”

“What woke you up so sudden?”

“I have never been asleep.” But he turned away his head lest she see the light in his eyes. “Oakley gives me my chance to get out, that is all. And I am very glad for your sake----”

“Aw!” Her voice, ringing out with ecstasy, converted the native syllable into music. “It means we are goin’ to live in Butte!”

“Of course.”

“And I was so took--taken by surprise it never dawned on me till this minute. Now what do you know about that?”

“We shall have to be very quiet. I cannot get my degree until a year from June--a year and seven months from now. I shall study day and night, and work in the mines during the winter and summer vacations. I cannot take you anywhere.”

“Lord knows it can’t be worse’n this. I’ll have my friends to talk to and there’s always the movin’ picture shows. Lord, how I’d like to see one.”

“Well, you shall,” he said kindly. “I wrote to Mark some time ago and asked him to give the tenant of the cottage notice. As this is the third of the month it must be empty and ready for us.”

“My goodness gracious!” cried his wife with pardonable irritation, “but you are a grand one for handin’ out surprises! Most husbands tell their wives things as they go along, but you ruminate like a cow and hand over the cud when you’re good and ready. I’m sick of bein’ treated as if I was a child.”

“Please don’t look at it in that way. What is the use of talking about things until one is quite sure they can be accomplished?”

“That’s half the fun of bein’ married,” said Ida with one of her flashes of intuition.

“Is it?” Gregory turned this over in his mind, then, out of his own experience, rejected it as a truism. He could not think of any subject he would care to discuss with his wife; or any other woman. But he kissed her with an unusual sense of compunction. “Perhaps I liked the idea of surprising you,” he said untruthfully. “You will be glad to live in Butte once more?”

“You may bet your bottom dollar on that. When do we go?”

“Tomorrow.”

“_Lands_ sakes! Well, I’m dumb. And breakfast has to be got if I _have_ had a bomb exploded under me. That Chink was doin’ fine when I left, but the Lord knows----”

She walked toward the rear of the house, temper in the swing of her hips, her head tossed high. Although rejoicing at the prospect of living in town, she was both angry and vaguely alarmed, as she so often had been before, at the unimaginable reserves, the unsuspected mental activities, and the sudden strikings of this life-partner who should have done his thinking out loud.

“Lord knows,” thought Mrs. Compton, as she approached her kitchen, with secret intent to relieve her feelings by “lambasting” the Mongolian and leaving Oakley to shift for himself, “it’s like livin’ with that there Sphinx. I don’t s’pose I’ll ever get used to him, and maybe the time’ll come when I won’t want to.”

III

Gregory stood for some time longer, leaning on the gate and waiting for the red fire to rise above the crystal mountains. He was eager for the morrow, not only because he longed to be at the foundation stones of his real life but because his mind craved the precise training, the logical development, the intoxicating sense of expansion which he had missed and craved incessantly during the six years that had elapsed since he had been torn from the School of Mines. Moreover, his heart was light; at last he was able to shift the great responsibilities of his ranch to other shoulders.

Some six months since, his friend, Mark Blake, had recommended to him a young man who not only had graduated at the head of his class in the State College of Agriculture, but had served for two years on one of the State Experimental Farms. “What he don’t know about scientific farming, dry, intensive, and all the rest, isn’t worth shucks, old man,” Blake had written. “He’s as honest as they come, and hasn’t a red to do the trick himself, but wants to go on a ranch as foreman, and farm wherever there’s soil of a reasonable depth. Of course he wants a share of the profits, but he’s worth it to you, for the Lord never cut you out for a rancher or farmer, well as you have done. What you want is to finish your course and take your degree. Try Oakley out for six months. There’ll be only one result. You’re a free man.”

The contract had been signed the day before. But Oakley had been a welcome guest in the small household for more than practical reasons. Until the night of his advent, when the two men sat talking until daylight, Gregory had not realised the mental isolation of his married life. Like all young men he had idealised the girl who made the first assault on his preferential passion; but his brain was too shrewd, keen, practical, in spite of its imaginative area, to harbor illusions beyond the brief period of novelty. It had taken him but a few weeks to discover that although his wife had every charm of youth and sex, and was by no means a fool, their minds moved on different planes, far apart. He had dreamed of the complete understanding, the instinctive response, the identity of tastes, in short of companionship, of the final routing of a sense of hopeless isolation he had never lost consciousness of save when immersed in study.

Ida subscribed for several of the “cheapest” of the cheap magazines, and, when her Mongolians were indulgent, rocked herself in the sitting-room, devouring the factory sweets and crude mental drugs with much the same spirit that revelled above bargain counters no matter what the wares. She “lived” for the serials, and attempted to discuss the “characters” with her husband and John Oakley. But the foreman was politely intolerant of cheap fiction, Gregory open in his disgust.

He admitted unequivocally that he had made a mistake, but assuming that most men did, philosophically concluded to make the best of it; women, after all, played but a small part in a man’s life. He purposed, however, that she should improve her mind, and would have been glad to move to Butte for no other reason. He had had a sudden vision one night, when his own mind, wearied with study, drifted on the verge of sleep, of a lifetime on a lonely ranch with a woman whose brain deteriorated from year to year, her face faded and vacuous, save when animated with temper. If the De Smet Ranch proved to be mineralised, Oakley, his deliverer, would not be forgotten.

He moved his head restlessly, his glance darting over as much of his fine estate as it could focus, wondering when it would give up its secrets, in other words, its gold. He had never doubted that it winked and gleamed, and waited for him below the baffling surfaces of his land. Not for millions down would he have sold his ranch, renounced the personal fulfilment of that old passionate romance.

Gregory Compton was a dreamer, not in the drifting and aimless fashion of the visionary, but as all men born with creative powers, practical or artistic, must be. Indeed, it is doubtful if the artistic brain--save possibly where the abnormal tracts are musical in the highest sense--ever need, much less develop, that leaping vision, that power of visualising abstract ideas, of the men whose gifts for bold and original enterprise enable them to drive the elusive wealth of the world first into a corner, then into their own pockets.

When one contemplates the small army of men of great wealth in the world today, and, just behind, that auxiliary regiment endowed with the talent, the imagination, and the grim assurance necessary to magnetise the circulating riches of our planet; contemptuous of those hostile millions, whose brains so often are of unleavened dough, always devoid of talent, envious, hating, but sustained by the conceit which nature stores in the largest of her reservoirs to pour into the vacancies of the minds of men; seldom hopeless, fooling themselves with dreams of a day when mere brute numbers shall prevail, and (human nature having been revolutionised by a miracle) all men shall be equal and content to remain equal;--when one stands off and contemplates these two camps, the numerically weak composed of the forces of mind, the other of the unelectrified yet formidable millions, it is impossible to deny not only the high courage and supernormal gifts of the little army of pirates, but that, barring the rapidly decreasing numbers of explorers in the waste places of the earth, in them alone is the last stronghold of the old adventurous spirit that has given the world its romance.

The discontented, the inefficient, the moderately successful, the failures, see only remorseless greed in the great money makers. Their temper is too personal to permit them to recognise that here are the legitimate inheritors of the dashing heroes they enjoy in history, the bold and ruthless egos that throughout the ages have transformed savagery into civilisation, torpor into progress, in their pursuit of gold. That these “doing” buccaneers of our time are the current heroes of the masses, envious or generous in tribute, the most welcome “copy” of the daily or monthly press, is proof enough that the spirit of adventure still flourishes in the universal heart, seldom as modern conditions permit its expansion. For aught we know it may be this old spirit of adventure that inspires the midnight burglar and the gentlemen of the road, not merely the desire for “easy money.” But these are the flotsam. The boldest imaginations and the most romantic hearts are sequestered in the American “big business” men of today.

Gregory Compton had grown to maturity in the most romantic subdivision of the United States since California retired to the position of a classic. Montana, her long winter surface a reflection of the beautiful dead face of the moon, bore within her arid body illimitable treasure, yielding it from time to time to the more ardent and adventurous of her lovers. Gold and silver, iron, copper, lead, tungsten, precious and semi-precious stones--she might have been some vast heathen idol buried aeons ago when Babylon was but a thought in the Creator’s brain, and the minor gods travelled the heaving spaces to immure their treasure, stolen from rival stars.

Gregory had always individualised as well as idealised his state, finding more companionship in her cold mysteries than in the unfruitful minds of his little world. His youthful dreams, when sawing wood or riding after cattle, had been alternately of desperate encounters with Indians and of descending abruptly into vast and glittering corridors. The creek on the ranch had given up small quantities of placer gold, enough to encourage “Old Compton,” least imaginative of men, to use his pick up the side of the gulch, and even to sink a shaft or two. But he had wasted his money, and he had little faith in the mineral value of the De Smet Ranch or in his own luck. He was a thrifty, pessimistic, hard-working, down-east Presbyterian, whose faith in predestination had killed such roots of belief in luck as he may have inherited with other attributes of man. He sternly discouraged his son’s hopes, which the silent intense boy expressed one day in a sudden mood of fervour and desire for sympathy, bidding him hang on to the live stock, which were a certain sure source of income, and go out and feed hogs when he felt onsettled like.

He died when Gregory was in the midst of his Junior year in the School of Mines, and the eager student was obliged to renounce his hope of a congenial career, for the present, and assume control of the ranch. It was heavily mortgaged; his father’s foreman, who had worked on the ranch since he was a lad, had taken advantage of the old man’s failing mind to raise the money, as well as to obtain his signature to the sale of more than half the cattle. He had disappeared with the concrete result a few days before Mr. Compton’s death.

It was in no serene spirit that Gregory entered upon the struggle for survival at the age of twenty-one. Bitterly resenting his abrupt divorce from the School of Mines, which he knew to be the gateway to his future, and his faith in mankind dislocated by the cruel defection of one whom he had liked and trusted from childhood, he seethed under his stolid exterior while working for sixteen hours a day to rid the ranch of its encumbrance and replace the precious cattle. But as the greater part of this time was spent out of doors he outgrew the delicacy of his youth and earlier manhood, and, with red blood and bounding pulses, his bitterness left him.

He began to visit Butte whenever he could spare a few days from the ranch, to “look up” as his one chum, Mark Blake, expressed it; so that by the time he married he knew the life of a Western mining town--an education in itself--almost as well as he knew the white and silent spaces of Montana. With the passing of brooding and revolt his old dreams revived, and he spent, until he married, many long days prospecting. He had found nothing until a few weeks ago, early in October, and then the discovery, such as it was, had been accidental.

There had been a terrific wind storm, beginning shortly after sundown, reaching at midnight a velocity of seventy-two miles an hour, and lasting until morning; it had been impossible to sleep or to go out of doors and see to the well-being of the cattle.

The wind was not the Chinook, although it came out of the west, for it was bitterly cold. Two of the house windows facing the storm were blown in and the roof of a recent addition went off. As such storms are uncommon in Montana, even Gregory was uneasy, fearing the house might go, although it had been his father’s boast that not even an earthquake could uproot it. After daybreak the steady fury of the storm ceased. There was much damage done to the outbuildings, but, leaving Oakley to superintend repairs, Gregory mounted his horse and rode over the ranch to examine the fences and brush sheds. The former were intact, and the cattle were huddled in their shelters, which were built against the side of a steep hill. A few, no doubt, had drifted before the storm, but would return in the course of the day. Here and there a pine tree had been blown over, but the winter wheat and alfalfa were too young to be injured.

He rode towards the hill where the wind had done its most conspicuous damage. It was a long steep hill of granite near the base and grey limestone above topped with red shales, and stood near the northeast corner of the ranch. Its rigid sides had been relieved by a small grove of pines; but although in spring it was gay with anemones and primrose moss, and green until late in July, there was nothing on its ugly flanks at this time of the year but sunburnt grass.

The old pines had clung tenaciously to the inhospitable soil for centuries, but some time during the night, still clutching a mass of earth and rock in their great roots, they had gone down before the storm.

Gregory felt a pang of distress; in his boyhood that grove of pines had been his retreat; there he had dreamed his dreams, visualised the ascending metals, forced upward from the earth’s magma by one of those old titanic convulsions that make a joke of the modern earthquake, to find a refuge in the long fissures of the cooler crust, or in the great shattered zones. He knew something of geology and chemistry when he was twelve, and he “saw” the great primary deposits change their character as they were forced closer to the surface, acted upon by the acids of air and water in the oxide zone.

There he had lived down his disappointments, taken his dumb trouble when his mother died; and he had found his way blindly to the dark little grove after his father’s funeral and he had learned the wrong that had been done him.

He had not gone there since. He had been busy always, and lost the habit. But now he remembered, and with some wonder, for it was the one ugly spot on the ranch, save in its brief springtime, that once it had drawn his feet like a magnet. Hardly conscious of the act, he rode to the foot of the hill, dismounted and climbed towards the grove which had stood about fifty feet from the crest.

The ruin was complete. The grove, which once may have witnessed ancient rites, was lying with its points in the brown grass. Its gaunt roots, packed close with red earth and pieces of rock, seemed to strain upward in agonised protest. Men deserted on the battlefield at night look hardly more stricken than a tree just fallen.

As Gregory approached his old friends his eyes grew narrower and narrower; his mind concentrated to a point as sharp and penetrating as a needle. If the storm, now fitful, had suddenly returned to its highest velocity he would not have known it. He walked rapidly behind the vanquished roots and picked out several bits of rock that were embedded in the earth. Then he knelt down and examined other pieces of rock in the excavation where the trees had stood. Some were of a brownish-yellow colour, others a shaded green of rich and mellow tints. There was no doubt whatever that they were float.

He sat down suddenly and leaned against the roots of the trees. Had he found his “mine”? Float indicates an ore body somewhere, and as these particles had been prevented from escaping by the roots of trees incalculably old, it was reasonable to assume that the ores were beneath his feet.

His brain resumed its normal processes, and he deliberately gave his imagination the liberty of its youth. The copper did not interest him, but he stared at the piece of quartz in his hand as if it had been a seer’s crystal. He saw great chambers of quartz flecked with free gold, connected by pipes or shoots equally rich. Once he frowned, the ruthlessly practical side of his intelligence reminding him that his labours and hopes might be rewarded by a shallow pocket. But he brushed the wagging finger aside. He could have sworn that he felt the pull of the metals within the hill.

He was tired and hungry, but his immediate impulse, as soon as he had concluded that he had dreamed long enough, was to go for his tools and run a cut. He sprang to his feet; but he had taken only a few steps when he turned and stared at the gashed earth, his head a little on one side in an attitude that always indicated he was thinking hard and with intense concentration. Then he set his lips grimly, walked down the steep hillside, mounted his horse, and rode home. In the course of the afternoon he returned to the hill, picked all the pieces of float from the soil between the tree-roots, and buried them, stamping down the earth. A few days later there was a light fall of snow. He returned once more to the hill, this time with two of his labourers, who cut up the trees and hauled them away. For the present his possible treasure vault was restored to the seclusion of its centuries.

He had made up his mind that the ores should stay where they were until he had finished his education in the School of Mines. He had planned to finish that course, and what he planned he was in the habit of executing. This was not the time for dreams, nor for prospecting, but to learn all that the School could teach him. Then, if there were valuable ore bodies in his hill he could be his own manager and engineer. He knew that he had something like genius for geology, also that many veins were lost through an imperfect knowledge (or sense) of that science in mining engineers; on the other hand, that the prospector, in spite of his much vaunted sixth sense, often failed, where the hidden ores were concerned, through lack of scientific training. He determined to train his own faculties as far as possible before beginning development work on his hill. Let the prospector’s fever get possession of him now and that would be the end of study. The hill would keep. It was his. The ranch was patented.

When he had finished the interment of the float he had taken a small notebook from his pocket and inscribed a date: June the third, eighteen months later. Not until that date would he even ride past his hill.

Born with a strong will and a character endowed with force, determination and a grimly passive endurance, it was his pleasure to test and develop both. The process was satisfactory to himself but sometimes trying to his friends.

Until this morning he had not permitted his mind to revert to the subject. But although the hill--Limestone Hill it was called in the commonplace nomenclature of the country--was far away and out of the range of his vision, he could conjure it up in its minutest external detail, and he permitted himself this luxury for a few moments after his wife had left him to a welcome solitude. On this hill were centred all his silent hopes.

If he had been greedy for riches alone he would have promoted a company at once, if a cut opened up a chamber that assayed well, and reaped the harvest with little or no trouble to himself. But nothing was farther from his mind. He wanted the supreme adventure. He wanted to find the ores with his own pick. After the adventure, then the practical use of wealth. There was much he could do for his state. He knew also that in one group of brain-cells, as yet unexplored, was the ambition to enter the lists of “doing” men, and pit his wits against the best of them. But he was young, he would have his adventure, live his dream first. Not yet, however.

The swift passing of his marital illusions had convinced him that the real passion of his life was for Montana and the golden blood in her veins. Placer mining never had interested him. He wanted to find his treasure deep in the jealous earth. He assured himself as he stood there in the blue dawn that it was well to be rid of love so early in the game, free to devote himself, with no let from wandering mind and mere human pulses, to preparation for the greatest of all romances, the romance of mining. That he might ever crave the companionship of one woman was as remote from his mind as the possibility of failure. To learn all that man and experience could teach him of the science that has been so great a factor in the world’s progress; to magnetise a vast share of Earth’s riches, first for the hot work of the battle, then for the power it would give him; to conquer life; these were a few of the flitting dreams that possessed him as he watched the red flame lick the white crests of the mountains, and the blue clouds turn to crimson; his long sensitive lips folded closely, his narrow eyes penetrating the mists of the future, neither seeing nor considering its obstacles, its barriers, its disenchantments. Thrice happy are the dreamers of the world, when their imaginations are creative, not a mere maggot wandering through the brain hatching formless eggs of desire and discontent. They are the true inheritors of the centuries, whether they succeed or fail in the eyes of men; for they live in vivid silent intense drama as even they have no power to live and enjoy in mortal conditions.

IV

The Comptons were quickly settled in the little cottage in East Granite Street, for as Mrs. Hook’s furniture was solid Ida had not sold it. There was little to do, therefore, but repaper the walls, build a bathroom, furnish a dining-room, send the parlour furniture to the upholsterers--Ida had had enough of horsehair--and chattel the kitchen.

Ida had several virtues in which she took a vocal pride, and not the least of these was housekeeping in all its variety. The luxurious side of her nature might revel in front parlours, trashy magazines, rocking-chairs and chewing-gum, but she never indulged in these orgies unless her house were in order. After her arrival in Butte it was quite a month before she gave a thought to leisure. They spent most of this time at a hotel, but Ida was out before the stores opened, and divided her day between the workmen at the cottage, the upholsterer, and the bargain counter. She was “on the job” every minute until the cottage was “on wheels.” Her taste was neither original nor artistic, but she had a rude sense of effect, and a passion for what she called colour schemes. She boasted to Gregory at night, when she had him at her mercy at the hotel dinner-table, that although everything had to be cheap except the kitchen furnishings, colours did not cost any more than black or drab. When the cottage was in order, and they moved in, he saw its transfigured interior for the first time. The bedroom was done in a pink that set his teeth on edge, and the little parlour was papered, upholstered, carpeted, cushioned in every known shade of red.

“All you want is a chromo or two of Indian battlegrounds--just after,” he remarked.

Ida interrupted tartly:

“Well, I should think you’d be grateful for the contrast to them everlasting white or brown mountains. We don’t get away from them even in town, now the smoke’s gone.”

“One would think Montana had no springtime.”

“Precious little. That’s the reason I’ve got a green dining-room.”

Gregory, who had suffered himself to be pushed into an arm-chair, looked at his wife speculatively, as she rocked herself luxuriously, her eyes dwelling fondly on the magenta paper, the crimson curtains, the turkey red and crushed strawberry cushions of the divan, the blood-red carpet with its still more sanguinary pattern. What blind struggle was going on in that uninstructed brain against the commonplace, what seed of originality, perhaps, striving to shoot forth a green tip from the hard crust of ignorance and conceit?

He had made up his mind to suggest the tillage of that brain without delay, but, knowing her sensitive vanity, cast about for a tactful opening.

“Do you really intend to do your own work?” he asked. “I am more than willing to pay for a servant.”

“Not much. I’m goin’ to begin to save up for the future right now. I’ll put out the wash, but it’s a pity if a great husky girl like me can’t cook for two and keep this little shack clean. You ain’t never goin’ to be able to say I didn’t help you all I could.”

Gregory glowed with gratitude as he looked at the beautiful face of has wife, flushed with the ardour of the true mate.

“You are all right,” he murmured.

“The less we spend the quicker we’ll get rich,” pursued Mrs. Compton. “I don’t mind this triflin’ work, but it would have made me sick to stay much longer on that ranch workin’ away my youth and looks and nothin’ to show for it. Now that you’ve really begun on somethin’ high-toned and that’s bound to be a go, I just like the idea of havin’ a hand in the job.”

“Ah!-- Well-- If you have this faith in my power to make a fortune--if you are looking forward to being a rich man’s wife, to put it crudely--don’t you think you should begin to prepare yourself for the position----”

“Now what are you drivin’ at?” She sprang to her feet. Her eyes blazed. Her hands went to her hips. “D’you mean to say I ain’t good enough? I suppose you’d be throwin’ me over for a grand dame when you get up in the world like some other millionaires we know of, let alone politicians what get to thinkin’ themselves statesmen, and whose worn-out old wives ain’t good enough for ’em. Well, take this from me and take it straight--I don’t propose to wear out, and I don’t propose----”

“Sit down. I shall be a rich man long before you lose your beauty. Nor have I any social ambitions. The world of men is all that interests me. But with you it will be different----”

“You may betcherlife it’ll be different--some! When I have a cream-coloured pressed brick house with white trimmings over there in Millionaire Gulch nobody’ll be too good for me.”

“You shall live your life to suit yourself, in the biggest house in Butte, if that is what you want. But there is more in it than that.”

“Clothes, of course. _Gowns!_ And jewels, and New York--Lord! wouldn’t I like to swell up and down Peacock Ally! And Southern California, and Europe, and givin’ balls, and bein’ a member of the Country Club.”

“All that, as a matter of course! But you would not be content with the mere externals. Whether you know it or not, Ida, you are an ambitious woman.” This was a mere gambler’s throw on Gregory’s part. He knew nothing of her ambitions, and would have called them by another name if he had.

“Not know it? Well, you may just betcherlife I know it!”

“But hardly where ambition leads. No sooner would you be settled in a fine house, accustomed to your new toys, than you would want society. I don’t mean that you would have any difficulty gaining admittance to Butte society, for it is said that none in the world is more hospitable and less particular. But whether you make _friends_ of the best people here, much less become a leader, depends--well, upon several things----”

“Fire away,” said Ida sulkily. “You must be considerable in earnest to talk a blue streak!”

“Business may take me to New York from time to time, but my home shall remain here. I never intend to abandon my state and make a fool of myself on New York’s doorstep as so many Montanans have done. Nail up that fact and never forget it. Now, you would like to win an unassailable position in your community, would you not?”

“Yep.”

Gregory abandoned tact. “Then begin at once to prepare yourself. You must have a teacher and study--English, above all things.”

“My Goo-r-rd!” She flushed almost purple. For the moment she hated him. “I’ve always suspicioned you thought I wasn’t good enough for you, with your graduatin’ from the High School almost while you was in short pants, and them two years and over at that high-brow School of Mines; and now you’re tellin’ me you’ll be ashamed of me the minute you’re on top!”

Gregory made another attempt at diplomacy. What his wife achieved socially was a matter of profound indifference to him, but she must reform her speech if his home life was to be endurable.

“I am forcing my imagination to keep pace with your future triumphs,” he said with the charming smile that disarmed even Ida when irate. “If you are going to be a prominent figure in society----”