The Furnace of Gold | Page 2

her unusual love of
adventure till she knew she must see it for herself. Moreover, he was
none too well. She had come to visit and surprise him.
In the second place, her fiancé, Searle Bostwick, he who was now at
the wheel, had also been marooned, as it were, in this sagebrush land,
by the golden allurements of fortune. Beth had simply made up her
mind to come, and for two days past had been waiting, with her maid,
at the pretty little town of Freemont, on the railroad, for Searle to
appear in his modern ship of the desert and treat her to the one day's
drive into Goldite, whither he also was bound.
The man now intent on the big machine and the sandy road was a
noticeable figure, despite the dust upon his raiment. He was a tall,
well-modeled man of thirty-five, with an air of distinction upon him,
materially heightened by his deep-set, piercing gray eyes, his firm,
bluish jaw, and the sprinkling of frost in his hair.
He wore no moustache. His upper lip, somewhat over long, bore that
same bluish tint that a thick growth of beard, even when diligently
shaved, imparted to his face. He was, indeed, a handsome being, in a
somewhat stern, determined style.
He was irritated now by the prospect of labor at the station. Even
should he find some willing male being whose assistance with the tire
might be invoked, the task would still involve himself rather

strenuously; and above all things he loathed rough usage of his hands.
For three more miles he cursed the mechanism, then he halted the car at
the station.
A shack that served as lodging-house, saloon, and dining-room, a shack
for a stable, and a shack for a shed, together with a rough corral,
comprised the entire group of buildings at the place. Six or eight fine
cottonwoods and a number of twisted apple trees made the little place
decidedly inviting. Behind these, rising almost sheer from the level
yard, the mountains heaved upward grayly, their vast bulk broken,
some hundred yards away, by a yawning rock canyon, steep and
forbidding.
The station proprietor, who emerged from the door at sound of the
halting machine, was a small, lank individual, as brown as an Indian
and as wrinkled as a crocodile. The driver in the car addressed him
shortly.
"I wonder if you can help me put on a tire?"
The lank little host regarded him quietly, then looked at the women and
drew his hand across his mouth.
"Wal, I dunno," he answered. "I've set a tire and I've set a hen, but I
wouldn't like to tell ye what was hatched."
The girl in the tonneau laughed in frank delight--a musical outburst that
flattered the station host tremendously. The man at the wheel was
already alighting.
"You'll do," he said. "My name is Bostwick. I'm on my way to Goldite,
in a hurry. It won't take us long, but it wants two men on the job."
He had a way of thrusting his disagreeable tasks upon his fellow beings
before they were prepared either to accept or refuse a proposition. He
succeeded here so promptly that the girl in the car made no effort to
restrain her amusement. She was radiantly smiling as she leaned above
the wheel where the two men were presently at work.

In the midst of the toil a sound of whistling came upon the air. The girl
in the auto looked up, alertly. It was the Toreador's song from Carmen
that she heard, riotously rendered. A moment later the whistler
appeared--and an exclamation all but escaped the girl's red, parted lips.
Mounted on a calico pony of strikingly irregular design, a horseman
had halted at the bend of a trail that led to the rear of the station. He
saw the girl and his whistling ceased.
From his looks he might have been a bandit or a prince. He was a
roughly dressed, fearless-looking man of the hills, youthful, tall, and as
carelessly graceful in the saddle as a fish in its natural clement.
The girl's brown eyes and his blue eyes met. She did not analyze the
perfect symmetry or balance of his features; she only knew his hair and
long moustache were tawny, that his face was bronzed, that his eyes
were bold, frank depths of good humor and fire. He was splendid to
look at--that she instantly conceded. And she looked at him steadily till
a warm flush rose to the pink of her ears, when her glance fell, abashed,
to the pistol that hung on his saddle, and so, by way of the hoofs of his
pinto steed, to the wheel, straight down where she was leaning.
The station-keeper glanced up briefly.
"Hullo,