PERCH OF THE
DEVIL

BY
GERTRUDE ATHERTON

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1914, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation into
foreign languages
Fourth Printing

TO
MR. FRANK J. EDWARDS AND
MR. WILTON G. BROWN
OF HELENA, MONTANA

PART I

PERCH OF THE DEVIL

PART I

I

“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——”

“My land, you oughter heard the grammar and slang of some of the newest West Siders when they were makin’ up their minds at Madame O’Reilley’s, or havin’ their measures took. They don’t frighten me one little bit.”

“There is a point. To lead them you must be their superior—and the equal of those that have made the most of their advantages.”

“That’s not such a bad idea.”

“Think it over.” He rose, for he was tired of the conversation. “These western civilisations are said to be crude, but I fancy they are the world in little. Subtlety, a brain developed beyond the common, should go far——”

“Greg, you are dead right!” She had suddenly remembered that she must play up to this man who held her ambitions in his hand, and she had the wit to acknowledge his prospicience, little as were the higher walks of learning to her taste. She sprang to her feet with a supple undulating movement and flung herself into his arms.

“I’ll begin the minute you find me a teacher,” she exclaimed. Then she kissed him. “I’m goin’ to keep right along with you and make you proud of me,” she murmured. “I’m crazy about you and always will be. Swear right here you’ll never throw me over, or run round with a P’rox.”

Gregory laughed, but held her off for a moment and stared into her eyes. After all, might not study and travel and experience give depth to those classic eyes which now seemed a mere joke of Nature? Was she merely the natural victim of her humble conditions? Her father had been a miner of a very superior sort, conservative and contemptuous of agitators, but a powerful voice in his union and respected alike by men and managers. Mrs. Hook had been a shrewd, hard-working, tight-fisted little woman from Concord, who had never owed a penny, nor turned out a careless piece of work. Both parents with education or better luck might have taken a high position in any western community. He knew also the preternatural quickness and adaptability of the American woman. But could a common mind achieve distinction?

Ida, wondering “what the devil he was thinking about,” nestled closer and gave him a long kiss, her woman’s wisdom, properly attributed to the serpent, keeping her otherwise mute. Gregory snatched her suddenly to him and returned her kiss. The new hope revived a passion by no means dead for this beautiful young creature, and for the hour he was as happy as during his rosy honeymoon.

V

WHEN the cottage was quite in order Mrs. Compton invited two of her old friends to lunch. As the School of Mines was at the opposite end of the city, Gregory took his midday meal with him.

Miss Ruby Miller and her twin-sister Pearl were fine examples of the self-supporting young womanhood of the West. Neither had struggled in the extreme economic sense, although when launched they had taken a man’s chances and asked no quarter. Born in a small town in Illinois, their father, a provident grocer, had permitted each of his daughters to attend school until her fifteenth year, then sent her to Chicago to learn a trade. Ruby had studied the mysteries of the hair, complexion, and hands; Pearl the science that must supplement the knack for trimming hats. Both worked faithfully as apprentice and clerk, saving the greater part of their earnings: they purposed to set up for themselves in some town of the Northwest where money was easier, opportunities abundant and expertness rare. What they heard of Montana appealed to their enterprising minds, and, beginning with cautious modesty, some four years before Ida’s marriage, Ruby was now the leading hair-dresser and manicure of Butte, her pleasant address and natural diplomacy assisting her competent hands to monopolise the West Side custom; Pearl, although less candid and engaging, more frank in reminding her customers of their natural deficiencies, was equally capable; if not the leading milliner in that town of many milliners, where even the miners’ wives bought three hats a season, she was rapidly making a reputation among the feathered tribe. She now ranked as one of the most successful of the young business women in a region where success is ever the prize of the efficient. Both she and her sister were as little concerned for their future as the metal hill of Butte itself.

“Well, what do you know about that?” they cried simultaneously, as Ida ushered them into the parlour. “Say, it’s grand!” continued Miss Ruby with fervour. “Downright artistic. Ide, you’re a wonder!”

Miss Pearl, attuned to a subtler manipulation of colour, felt too happy in this intimate reunion and the prospect of “home-cooking,” to permit even her spirit to grin. “Me for red, kiddo,” she said. “It’s the colour a hard workin’ man or woman wants at the end of the day—warm, and comfortin’, and sensuous-like, and contrastin’ fine with dirty streets and them hills. Glory be, but this chair’s comfortable! I suppose it’s Greg’s.”

“Of course. Luckily a woman don’t have the least trouble findin’ out a man’s weak points, and Greg has a few, thank the goodness godness. But come on to the dining-room. I’ve got fried chicken and creamed potatoes and raised biscuit.”

The guests shrieked with an abandon that proclaimed them the helpless victims of the Butte restaurant or the kitchenette. The fried chicken in its rich gravy, and the other delicacies, including fruit salad, disappeared so rapidly that there was little chance for the play of intellect until the two girls fled laughing to the parlour.

“It’s all very well for Pearl,” cried Miss Ruby, disposing her plump figure in Gregory’s arm-chair, and taking the pins from a mass of red hair that had brought her many a customer; “for she’s the kind that’ll never have to diet if she gets rich quick. I ought to be shassaying round with my hands on my hips right now, but I won’t.”

Miss Pearl extended herself on the divan, and Ida rocked herself with a complacent smile. One of her vanities was slaked, and she experienced a sense of immense relief in the society of these two old friends of her own sort.

“Say!” exclaimed Miss Miller, “if we was real swell, now, we’d be smokin’ cigarettes.”

“What!” cried Ida, scandalised. “No lady’d do such a thing. Say, I forgot the gum.”

She opened a drawer and flirted an oblong section of chewing-gum at each of her guests, voluptuously inserting a morsel in the back of her own mouth. “Where on earth have you seen ladies smokin’ cigarettes?”

“You forget I’m in and out of some of our best families. In other words them that’s too swell—or too lazy—to come to me, has me up to them. And they’re just as nice—most of ’em—as they can be; no more airs than their men, and often ask me to stay to lunch. I ain’t mentionin’ no names, as I was asked not to, for you know what an old-fashioned bunch there is in every Western town—well, they out with their gold tips after lunch, and maybe you think they don’t know how. I have my doubts as to their enjoyin’ it, for tobacco is nasty tastin’ stuff, and I notice they blow the smoke out quicker’n they take it in. No inhalin’ for them. But they like doin’ it; that’s the point. And I guess they do it a lot at the Country Club and at some of the dinners where the Old Guard ain’t asked. They smoke, and think it’s vulgar to chew gum! We know it’s the other way round.”

“Well, I guess!” exclaimed the young matron, who had listened to this chronicle of high life with her mouth open. “What their husbands thinkin’ about to permit such a thing! I can see Greg’s face if I lit up.”

“Oh, their husbands don’t care,” said Pearl, the cynic. “Not in that bunch. They’re trained, and they don’t care, anyhow. Make the most of Greg now, kiddo. When he strikes it rich, he’ll be just like the rest of ’em, annexin’ right and left. Matter of principle.”

“Principle nothing!” exclaimed Ruby, who, highly sophisticated as any young woman earning her living in a mining town must be, was always amiable in her cynicism. “It’s too much good food and champagne, to say nothin’ of cocktails and highballs and swell club life after the lean and hungry years. They’re just like kids turned loose in a candy store, helpin’ themselves right and left with both hands. Dear old boys, they’re so happy and so jolly you can’t help feelin’ real maternal over ’em, and spoilin’ ’em some more. I often feel like it, even when they lay for me—they look so innocent and hungry-like; but others I could crack over the ear, and I don’t say I haven’t. Lord, how a girl alone does get to know men! I wouldn’t marry one of them if he’d give me the next level of the Anaconda mine. Me for the lonesome!”

“Well, I’m glad I’m married,” said Ida complacently. “The kind of life I want you can only get through a husband. Greg’s goin’ to make money, all right.”

“Greg won’t be as bad as some,” said the wise Miss Ruby. “He’s got big ideas, and as he don’t say much about ’em, he’s likely thinkin’ about nothin’ else. At least that’s the way I figure him out. The Lord knows I’ve seen enough of men. But you watch out just the same. Them long thin ones that looks like they was all brains and jaw is often the worst. They’ve got more nerves. The minute the grind lets up they begin to look out for an adventure, wonderin’ what’s round the next corner. Wives ain’t much at supplyin’ adventure——”

“Well, let’s quit worryin’ about what ain’t happened,” said Miss Pearl abruptly. Men did not interest her. “Will he take you to any of the dances? That’s what I want to know. You’ve been put up and elected to our new and exclusive Club. No more Coliseum Saturday Nights for us—Race Track is a good name for it. We’ve taken a new little hall over Murphy’s store for Saturday nights till the Gardens open up, and we have real fun. No rowdyism. We leave that to the cut below. This Club is composed of real nice girls and young men of Butte who are workin’ hard at something high-toned and respectable, and frown hard on the fast lot.”

“Sounds fine. Perhaps Greg’ll go, though he studies half the night. Do you meet at any other time? Is it one of them mind improvers, too?”

“Nixie. We work all week and want fun when we get a few hours off. I improve my mind readin’ myself to sleep every night——”

“What do you read?” interrupted Ida, eagerly.

“Oh, the mags, of course, and a novel now and then. But you don’t need novels any more. The mags are wonders! They teach you all the life you don’t know—all the way from lords to burglars. Then there’s the movin’ pictures. Lord, but we have advantages our poor mothers never dreamed of!”

“Greg wants me to study with a teacher.” Ida frowned reminiscently and fatidically. “He seems to think I didn’t get nothin’ at school.”

“Well, what do you know about that?” gasped Miss Miller. Pearl removed her gum with a dry laugh.

“If a man insinuated I wasn’t good enough for him—” she began; Ruby, whose quick mind was weather-wise, interrupted her.

“Greg’s right. He’s got education himself and’s proved he don’t mean to be a rancher all his life. What’s more, I’ve heard men say that Gregory Compton is bound one way or another to be one of the big men of Montana. He’s got the brains, he’s got the jaw, and he can outwork any miner that ever struck, and no bad habits. Ide, you go ahead and polish up.”

“Why should I? I never could see that those bonanzerines were so much better’n us, barring clothes.”

“You don’t know the best of ’em, Ide. Madame O’Reilley was too gaudy to catch any but the newest bunch. The old pioneer guard is fine, and their girls have been educated all over this country and the next. Lord! Look at Ora Blake! Where’d you beat her? In these new Western towns it’s generally the sudden rich that move to New York to die of lonesomeness, and nowhere to show their clothes but Peacock Alley in the Waldorf-Astoria. The real people keep their homes here, if they are awful restless; and I guess the Society they make, with their imported gowns and all, ain’t so very different from top Society anywheres. Of course, human nature is human nature, and some of the younger married women are sporty and take too much when a bunch goes over to Boulder Springs for a lark, or get a crush on some other woman’s husband—for want mostly of something to do; but their grammar’s all right. I hope you’ll teach them a lesson when you’re on top, Ide. Good American morals for me, like good American stories. I always skip the Europe stories in the mags. Don’t seem modern and human, somehow, after Butte.”

“Now I like Europe stories,” said Ida, “just because they are so different. The people in ’em ain’t walkin’ round over gold and copper when they’re dishwashin’ or makin’ love, but their mines have been turned centuries ago into castles and pictures and grand old parks. There’s a kind of halo——”

“Halo nothin’!” exclaimed Miss Pearl, who was even more aggressively American than her sister. “It’s them ridiculous titles. And kings and queens and all that antique lot. I despise ’em, and I’m dead set against importin’ foreign notions into God’s own country. We’re dyed-in-the-wool Americans—out West here, anyhow—including every last one of them fools that’s buyin’ new notions with their new money. All their Paris clothes and hats, and smokin’ cigarettes, and loose talk can’t make ’em anything else. Apin’ Europe and its antiquated morals makes me sick to my stomach. Cut it out, kid, before you go any further. Stand by your own country and it’ll stand by you.”

“Well, I’ve got an answer to that. In the first place I’d like to know where you’ll find more girls on the loose than right here in Butte—and I don’t mean the sporting women, either. Why, I meet bunches of schoolgirls every day so painted up they look as if they was fixin’ right now to be bad; and as for these Eastern workin’ girls who come out here after jobs, pretendin’ it’s less pressure and bigger pay they’re after, when it’s really to turn loose and give human nature a chance with free spenders—well, the way they hold down their jobs and racket about all night beats me. None of them’s been to Europe, I notice, and I’d like to bet that the schoolgirls that don’t make monkeys of themselves is the daughters of them that has.”

“Oh, the schoolgirls is just plain little fools and no doubt has their faces held under the spout for ’em when they get home. But as for the Eastern girls, you hit it when you said they come out here to give human nature a chance. Some girls is born bad, thousands and thousands of them; and reformers might just as well try to grow strawberries in a copper smelter as to make a girl run straight when she is lyin’ awake nights thinkin’ up new ways of bein’ crooked. But the rotten girls in this town are not the whole show. And lots of women that would never think of goin’ wrong—don’t naturally care for that sort of thing a bit—just get their minds so mixed up by too much sudden money, and liberty, and too much high livin’ and too much Europe and too much nothin’ to do, that they just don’t know where they’re at; and it isn’t long either before they get to thinkin’ they’re not the dead swell thing unless they do what the nobility of Europe seems to be doin’ all the time——”

“Shucks!” interrupted Ruby, indignantly. “It’s just them stories in the shady mags, and the way our women talk for the sake of effect. There’s bad in America and good in poor old Europe. I’ll bet my new hat on it. Only, over there the good is out of sight under all that sportin’ high life everybody seems to write about. Over here we’ve got a layer of good on top as thick as cream, and every kind of germ swimmin’ round underneath. Lord knows there are plenty of just females in this town, of all towns, but the U. S. is all right because it has such high standards. All sorts of new-fangled notions come and go but them standards never budge. No other country has anything like ’em. Sooner or later we’ll catch up. I’m great on settin’ the right example and I’m dead set on uplift. That’s one reason we’re so strict about our Club membership. Not one of them girls can get in, no matter how good her job or how swell a dresser she is. And they feel it, too, you bet. The line’s drawn like a barbed-wire fence.”

“I guess you’re dead right,” admitted Ida. “And my morals ain’t in any danger, believe me. I’ve got other fish to fry. I’ve had love’s young dream and got over it. I’m just about dead sick of that side of life. I’d cut it out and put it down to profit and loss, but you’ve got to manage men every way nature’s kindly provided, and that’s all there is to it.”

“My land!” exclaimed Ruby. “If I felt that way about my husband I’d leave him too quick.”

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t. You can make up your mind to any old thing. That’s life. And I guess life never holds out both hands full at once. Either, one’s got a knife in it or it’s out of sight altogether.”

Ruby snorted with disgust. “Once more I vow I’ll marry none of them. Me for self-respect.”

“Now as to Europe,” pursued Ida. “You’re just nothin’ till you’ve been, both as to what you get, and sayin’ you’ve been there——”

“Ida,” said Ruby, shaking her wise red head, “don’t you go leaving your husband summers, like the rest. Men don’t get much chance to go to Europe. They prefer little old New York, anyhow—when they get on there alone. I wonder what ten thousand wives that go to Europe every summer think their husbands are doin’? I haven’t manicured men for nine years without knowin’ they need watchin’ every minute. Why, my lord! they’re so tickled to death when summer comes round they can hardly wait to kiss their wives good-bye and try to look lonesome on the platform. They’d like to be down and kick up their heels right there at the station. And I didn’t have to come to Butte to find that out.”

“Greg’ll never run with that fast lot.”

“No, but he might meet an affinity; and there’s one of them lyin’ in wait for every man.”

Ida’s brow darkened. “Well, just let her look out for herself, that’s all. I’ll hang on to Greg. But it ain’t time to worry yet. Let’s have a game of poker.”

VI

GREGORY, through the offices of his friend, Mark Blake, found a teacher for Ida before the end of the week, Mr. William Cullen Whalen, Professor of English in the Butte High School.

Mr. Whalen’s present status was what he was in the habit of designating as an ignominious anti-climax, considering his antecedents and attainments; but he always dismissed the subject with a vague, “Health—health—this altitude—this wonderful air—climate—not for me are the terrible extremes of our Atlantic seaboard. Here a man may be permitted to live, if not in the deeper sense—well, at least, there are always one’s thoughts—and books.”

He was a delicate little man as a matter of fact, but had East winds and summer humidities been negligible he would have jumped at the position found for him by a college friend who had gone West and prospered in Montana. This friend’s letter had much to say about the dry tonic air of winter, the cool light air of summer, the many hours he would be able to pass in the open, thus deepening the colour of his corpuscles, at present a depressing shade of pink; but even more about a salary far in excess of anything lying round loose in the East. Mr. Whalen, who, since his graduation from the college in his native town, had knocked upon several historic portals of learning in vain, finding himself invariably outclassed, had shuddered, but accepted his fate by the outgoing mail. Of course he despised the West; and the mere thought of a mining camp like Butte, which was probably in a drunken uproar all the time, almost nauseated him. However, in such an outpost the graduate of an Eastern college who knew how to wear his clothes must rank high above his colleagues. It might be years before he could play a similar rôle at home. So he packed his wardrobe, which included spats and a silk hat, and went.

Nature compensates even her comparative failures by endowing them with a deathless self-conceit. Whalen was a man of small abilities, itching ambition, all the education his brains could stand, and almost happy in being himself and a Whalen. It was true that Fortune had grafted him on a well-nigh sapless branch in a small provincial town, while the family trunk flourished, green, pruned, and portly, in Boston, but no such trifle could alter the fact that he was a Whalen, and destined by a discriminating heredity to add to the small but precious bulk of America’s literature. Although he found Butte a city of some sixty thousand inhabitants, and far better behaved than he had believed could be possible in a community employing some fifteen thousand miners, he was still able to reassure himself that she outraged every sensibility. He assured himself further that its lurid contrasts to the higher civilisation would play like a search-light upon the theme for a novel he long had had in mind: the subtle actions and reactions of the Boston temperament.

But that was three years ago, and meanwhile several things had happened to him. He had ceased to wear his spats and silk hat in public after their first appearance on Broadway; the newsboys, who were on strike, had seen to that. He wrote his novel, and the Atlantic Monthly, honored by the first place on his list, declined to give space to his innocent plagiarisms of certain anæmic if literary authors now passing into history. An agent sent the manuscript the rounds without avail, but one of the younger editors had suggested that he try his hand at Montana. He was more shocked and mortified at this proposition than at the failure of his novel. Time, however, as well as the high cost of living in Butte, lent him a grudging philosophy, and he digested the advice. But his were not the eyes that see. The printed page was his world, his immediate environment but a caricature of the subtle realities. Nevertheless, he had what so often appears in the most unlikely brains, the story-telling kink. Given an incident he could work it up with an abundance of detail and “psychology,” easily blue-pencilled, and a certain illusion. Condescend to translate his present surroundings into the sacred realm of American fiction he would not, but he picked the brains of old-timers for thrilling incidents of the days when gold was found at the roots of grass, and the pioneers either were terrorized by the lawless element or executed upon it a summary and awful justice. Some of his tales were so blood-curdling, so steeped in gore and horror, that he felt almost alive when writing them. It was true that their market was the Sunday Supplement and the more sensational magazines, whose paper and type made his soul turn green; but the pay was excellent, and they had begun to attract some attention, owing to the contrast between the fierceness of theme and the neat precise English in which it was served. Butte valued him as a counter-irritant to Mary McLane, and he became a professional diner-out.

“Do you think he’ll condescend to tutor?” Gregory had asked of Blake. Whalen was by no means unknown to him, but heretofore had been regarded as a mere worm.

“Sure thing. Nobody keener on the dollar than Whalen. He’ll stick you, but he knows his business. He’s got all the words there are, puts ’em in the right place, and tones ’em up so you’d hardly know them.”

VII

IDA was out when her prospective tutor called, and she was deeply impressed by the card she found under the door: “Mr. William Cullen Whalen,” it was inscribed.

It was the custom of the gentlemen of her acquaintance to express their sense of good fellowship even upon the formal pasteboard. “Mr. Matt Dance,” “Mr. Phil Mott,” “Mr. Bill Jarvis,” the legends read. Ida felt as if she were reciting a line from the Eastern creed as her lips formed again and again the suave and labial syllables on her visitor’s card. She promptly determined to order cards for her husband on the morrow—he was so remiss as to have none—and they should be engraved, in small Roman letters: “Mr. Gregory Verrooy Compton.”

“And believe me,” she announced to her green dining-room, as she sat down before her husband’s desk, “that is some name.”

Her note to Professor Whalen, asking him to call on the following afternoon at two o’clock, was commendably brief, so impatient was she to arrive at the signature, “Mrs. Gregory Verrooy Compton;” little conceiving the effect it would have upon Mr. Whalen’s fastidious spine.

He called at the hour named, and Ida invited him into the dining-room. It was here that Gregory read far into the night, and she vaguely associated a large table with much erudition. Moreover, she prided herself upon her economy in fuel.

Mr. Whalen sat in one of the hard, upright chairs, his stick across his knee, his gloves laid smartly in the rolling brim of his hat, studying this new specimen and wondering if she could be made to do him credit. He was surprised to find her so beautiful, and not unrefined in style—if only she possessed the acumen to keep her ripe mouth shut. In fact he found her quite the prettiest woman he had seen in Butte, famous for pretty women; and—and—he searched conscientiously for the right word, and blushed as he found it—the most seductive. Ida was vain of the fact that she wore no corset, and that not the least of her attractions was a waist as flexible as an acrobat’s. What flesh she had was very firm, her carriage was easy and graceful, the muscles of her back were strong, her lines long and flowing; she walked and moved at all times with an undulating movement usually associated with a warmer temperament. But nature often amuses herself bestowing the semblance and withholding the essence; Ida, calculating and contemptuous of the facile passions of men, amused herself with them, confident of her own immunity.

It was now some time since she had enjoyed the admiration of any man but her husband, and his grew more and more sporadic, was long since dry of novelty. Like most Western husbands, he would not have permitted her to make a friend of any other man, nor even to receive the casual admirer when he was not at home. Ida was full of vanity, although she would have expressed her sudden determination to captivate “little Whalen” merely as a desire to keep her hand in. He was the only man upon whom she was likely to practise at present (for Gregory would have none of the Club dances), and vanity can thirst like a galled palate. She had “sized him up” as a “squirt” (poor Ida! little she recked how soon she was to be stripped of her picturesque vocabulary), but he was “a long sight better than nothing.”

After they had exhausted the nipping weather, and the possibility of a Chinook arriving before night—there was a humming roar high overheard at the moment—she lowered her black eyelashes, lifted herself against the stiff back of her chair with the motion of a snake uncoiling, raised her thick white lids suddenly, and murmured:

“Well, so you’re goin’ to polish me off? Tell me all my faults! Fire away. I know you’ll make a grand success of it. Lord knows (her voice became as sweet as honey), you’re different enough from the other men in this jay town.”

Mr. Whalen felt as if he were being drenched with honey dew, for he was the type of man whom women take no trouble to educate. But as that sweet unmodulated voice stole about his ear porches he drew himself up stiffly, conscious of a thrill of fear. To become enamoured of the wife of one of these forthright Westerners, who took the law into their own hands, was no part of his gentle programme; but he stared at her fascinated, never having felt anything resembling a thrill before. Moreover, like all people of weak passions, more particularly that type of American that hasn’t any, he took pride in his powers of self-control. In a moment he threw off the baleful influence and replied drily.

“I think the lessons would better be oral for a time. Do—do I understand that I am to correct your individual method of expression?”

“That’s it, I guess.”

“And you won’t be offended?” Mr. Whalen’s upper teeth were hemispheric, but he had cultivated a paternal and not unpleasing smile. Even the pale blue orbs, fixed defiantly upon the siren, warmed a trifle.

“Well. I don’t s’pose I’ll like bein’ corrected better’n the next, but that’s what I’m payin’ for. Now that my husband’s studyin’ for a profession, I guess I’ll be in the top set before so very long. There’s Mrs. Blake, for instance—her husband told Mr. Compton she’d call this week. Is she all that she’s cracked up to be?”

“Mrs. Blake has had great advantages. She might almost be one of our own products, were it not for the fact that she—well—seems deliberately to wish to be Western.” He found himself growing more and more confused under the steady regard of those limpid shadowy eyes—set like the eyes of a goddess in marble, and so disconcertingly shallow. He pulled himself up sharply. “Now, if I may begin—you must not sign your notes, ‘Mrs. Gregory Verrooy Compton’——”

Ida’s eyes flashed wide open. “Why not, I’d like to know? Isn’t it as good a name as yours?”

“What has that to do with it? Ah—yes—you don’t quite understand. It is not the custom—in what we call society—to sign in that manner—it is a regrettable American provincialism. If you really wish to learn——”

“Fire away,” said Ida sullenly.

“Sign your own name—may I ask what it is?”

“My name was Ida Maria Hook before I married.”

“Ida is a beautiful and classic name. We will eliminate the rest. Sign yourself Ida Compton—or if you wish to be more swagger, Ida Verrooy Compton——”

“Land’s sake! We’d be laughed clean out of Montana.”

“Yes, there is a fine primitive simplicity about many things in this region,” replied Mr. Whalen, thinking of his spats and silk hat. “But you get my point?”

“I get you.”

“Oh!—We’ll have a little talk later about slang. And you mustn’t begin your letters, particularly to an acquaintance, ‘Dear friend.’ This is an idealistic and—ah—bucolic custom, but hardly good form.”

He was deeply annoyed at his lack of fluency, but Ida once more was deliberately “upsetting” him. She smiled indulgently.

“I guess I like your new-fangled notions. I’ll write all that down while you’re thinkin’ up what to say next.”

She leaned over the table and wrote slowly that he might have leisure to admire her figure in profile. But he gazed sternly out of the window until she swayed back to the perpendicular and demanded,

“What next? Do you want me to say băth and căn’t?”

“Oh, no, I really shouldn’t advise it, not in Butte. I don’t wish to teach you anything that will add to the discomforts of life—so long as your lines are cast here. Just modify the lamentably short American a a bit.” And he rehearsed her for a few moments.

“Fine. I’ll try it on Greg—Mr. Compton. If he laughs I’ll know I’m too good, but if he only puckers his eyebrows and looks as if somethin’ queer was floatin’ round just out of sight, then I’ll know I’ve struck the happy medium. I’ll be a real high-brow in less than no time.”

“You certainly are surprisingly quick,” said Professor Whalen handsomely. “In a year I could equip you for our centres of culture, but as I remarked just now it would not be kind to transform you into an exotic. Now, suppose we read a few pages of this grammar——”

“I studied grammar at school,” interrupted Ida haughtily. “What do you take Butte for, anyhow. It may be a mining camp, and jay enough compared with your old Boston, but I guess we learn something mor’n the alphabet at all these big red brick schoolhouses we’ve got—Montana’s famous for its grand schoolhouses——”

“Yes, yes, my dear Mrs. Compton. But, you know, one forgets so quickly. And then so many of you don’t stay in school long enough. How old were you when you left?”

“Fifteen. Ma wouldn’t let me go to the High.”

“Precisely. Well, I will adhere to my original purpose, and defer books until our next lesson. Perhaps you would like me to tell you something more of our Eastern methods of speech—not only words, but—er—syntax——”

“Oh, hang your old East! You make me feel downright patriotic.”

Professor Whalen was conscious that it was a distinct pleasure to make those fine eyes flash. “One would think we were not all Americans,” he said with a smile.

“Well, I guess you look upon America as East and West too. Loads of young surveyors and mining men come out here to make their pile, and at first Montana ain’t good enough to black their boots, but it soon takes the starch out of ’em. No use puttin’ on dog here. It don’t work.”

“Oh, I assure you it’s merely a difference of manner—of—er tradition. We—and I in particular—find your West most interesting—and significant. I—ah—regard it as the great furnace under our civilization.”

“And we are the stokers! I like your impudence!”

He had no desire to lose this remunerative pupil, whose crude mind worked more quickly than his own. She was now really angry and he made a mild dive in search of his admitted tact.

“My dear lady, you put words into my mouth that emanate from your own clever brain, not from my merely pedantic one. Not only have I the highest respect for the West, and for Montana in particular, but please remember that the contempt of the East for the West is merely passive, negative, when compared with the lurid scorn of the West for the East. ‘Effete’ is its mildest term of opprobrium. I doubt if your ‘virile’ Westerner believes us to be really alive, in a condition to inhabit aught but a museum. Your men when they ‘make their pile’, or take a vacation, never dream of going to Boston, seldom, indeed, to Europe. They take the fastest train for New York—and by no means with a view to exploring that wilderness for its oases of culture——”

“Well, I guess not!” cried Ida, her easy good nature restored. “All-night restaurants, something new in the way of girls—‘chickens’ and ‘squabs’—musical shows, watchin’ the sun rise—that’s their little old New York. They always come home shakin’ themselves like a Newfoundland puppy, or purrin’ like a cat full of cream, but talkin’ about the Great Free West, God’s Own Country, and the Big Western Heart. I’ve a friend who does manicurin’, and she knows ’em like old shoes.”

Whalen, who had a slight cultivated sense of humor, laughed. “You are indeed most apt and picturesque, dear Mrs. Compton. But—while I think of it—you mustn’t drop your final gs. That, I am told, is one of the fashionable divagations of the British aristocracy. But with us it is the hallmark of the uneducated. Now, I really have told you all you can remember for one day, and will take my leave. It is to be every other day, I understand. On Wednesday, then, at two?”

VIII

IDA walked to the gate with him. She was quite a head taller than he, but subtly made him feel that the advantage was his, as it enabled her to pour the light of her eyes downward. He picked his way up the uneven surface of East Granite Street, slippery with a recent fall of snow, not only disturbed, but filled with a new conceit; in other words thrilling with his first full sense of manhood.

Ida looked after him, smiling broadly. But the smile fled abruptly, her lips trembled, then contracted. Advancing down the street was Mrs. Mark Blake. Ida had known her enterprising young husband before he changed his name from Mike to Mark, but she knew his lady wife by sight only; Mrs. Blake had not patronized Madame O’Reilley. Ruby and Pearl pronounced her “all right”, although a trifle “proud to look at.” Ida assumed that she was to receive the promised call, and wished she could “get out of it.” Not only did she long for her rocker, gum and magazine, after the intellectual strain of the past hour, but she had no desire to meet Mrs. Blake or any of “that crowd” until she could take her place as their equal. She had her full share of what is known as class-consciousness, and its peculiar form of snobbery. To be patronized by “swells”, even to be asked to their parties, would give her none of that subtle joy peculiar to the climbing snob. When the inevitable moment came she would burst upon them, dazzle them, bulldoze and lead them, but she wanted none of their crumbs.

But she was “in for it.” She hastily felt the back of her shirtwaist to ascertain if it still were properly adjusted, and sauntered towards the cottage humming a tune, pretending not to have seen the lady who stopped to have a word with Professor Whalen. “Anyhow, she’s not a bonanzerine,” thought Ida. “I guess she did considerable scrapin’ at one time; and Mark, for all he could make shoe-blackin’ look like molasses, ain’t a millionaire yet.”

She might indeed, further reflected Ida, watching the smartly tailored figure out of the corner of her eye, be pitied, for she had been “brought up rich, expecting to marry a duke, and then come down kaplunk before she’d much more’n a chance to grow up.” Her father, Judge Stratton, a graduate of Columbia University, had been one of the most brilliant and unscrupulous lawyers of the Northwest. He had drawn enormous fees from railroads and corporations, and in the historic Clark-Daly duels for supremacy in the State of Montana, and in the more picturesque battle between F. Augustus Heinze and “Amalgamated” (that lusty offspring of the great Standard Oil Trust), when the number of estimable citizens bought and sold demonstrated the faint impress of time on original sin, his legal acumen and persuasive tongue, his vitriolic pen, ever had been at the disposal of the highest bidder.

He had been a distinguished resident of Butte but a few years when he built himself a spacious if hideous residence on the West Side. But this must have been out of pure loyalty to his adopted state, for it was seldom occupied, although furnished in the worst style of the late seventies and early eighties. Mrs. Stratton and her daughter spent the greater part of their time in Europe. As Judge Stratton disliked his wife, was intensely ambitious for his only child, and preferred the comforts of his smaller home on The Flat, he rarely recalled his legitimate family, and made them a lavish allowance. He died abruptly of apoplexy, and left nothing but a life insurance of five thousand dollars; he had neglected to take out any until his blood vessels were too brittle for a higher risk.

Mrs. Stratton promptly became an invalid, and Ora brought her home to Butte, hoping to save something from the wreck. There was nothing to save. As she had not known of the life insurance when they received the curt cablegram in Paris, she had sold all of her mother’s jewels save a string of pearls, and, when what was left of this irrelative sum after the luxurious journey over sea and land, was added to the policy, the capital of these two still bewildered women represented little more than they had been accustomed to spend in six months. When Mark Blake, who had studied law in Judge Stratton’s office after graduating from the High School, and now seemed to be in a fair way to inherit the business, besides being County Attorney at the moment, implored Ora to marry him, and manifested an almost equal devotion to her mother, whom he had ranked with the queens of history books since boyhood, she accepted him as the obvious solution of her problem.

She was lonely, disappointed, mortified, a bit frightened. She had lived the life of the average American princess, and although accomplished had specialised in nothing; nor given a thought to the future. As she had cared little for the society for which her mother lived, and much for books, music, and other arts, and had talked eagerly with the few highly specialised men she was fortunate enough to meet, she had assumed that she was clever. She also believed that when she had assuaged somewhat her appetite for the intellectual and artistic banquet the gifted of the ages had provided, she might develop a character and personality, possibly a gift of her own. But she was only twenty when her indulgent father died, and, still gorging herself, was barely interested in her capacities other than receptive, less still in the young men that sought her, unterrified by her reputation for brains. She fancied that she should marry when she was about twenty-eight, and have a salon somewhere; and the fact that love had played so little a part in her dreams made it easier to contemplate marriage with this old friend of her childhood. His mother had been Mrs. Stratton’s seamstress, to be sure, but as he was a good boy,—he called for the frail little woman every evening to protect her from roughs on her long walk east to the cottage her husband had built shortly before he was blown to pieces somewhere inside of Butte—he had been permitted to hold the dainty Ora on his knee, or toss her, gurgling with delight, into the air until he puffed.

Mark had been a fat boy, and was now a fat young man with a round rosy face and a rolling lazy gait. He possessed an eye of remarkable shrewdness, however, was making money rapidly, never lost sight of the main chance, and was not in the least surprised when his marriage lifted him to the pinnacle of Butte society. In spite of his amiable weaknesses, he was honest if sharp, an inalienable friend, and he made a good husband according to his lights. Being a man’s man, and naturally elated at his election to the exclusive Silver Bow Club soon after his marriage to the snow maiden of his youthful dreams, he formed the habit of dropping in for a game of billiards every afternoon on his way home, and returning for another after dinner. But within three years he was able to present the wife of whom he was inordinately proud with a comfortable home on the West Side, and he made her an allowance of ever increasing proportions.

Ora, who had her own idea of a bargain, had never complained of neglect nor intimated that she found anything in him that savoured of imperfection. She had accepted him as a provider, and as he filled this part of the contract brilliantly, she felt that to treat him to scenes whose only excuse was outraged love or jealousy, would be both unjust and absurd. Moreover, his growing passion for his club was an immense relief after his somewhat prolonged term of marital uxoriousness, and as her mother died almost coincidentally with the abridgment of Mr. Blake’s home life, Ora returned to her studies, rode or walked for hours, and, after her double period of mourning was over, danced two or three times a week in the season, or sat out dances when she met a man that had cultivated his intellect. For women she cared little.

It never occurred to Mark to be jealous of his passionless wife, although he would have asserted his authority if she had received men alone in the afternoon. But Ora paid a scrupulous deference to his wishes in all respects. She even taught herself to keep house, and her servants manners as well as the elements of edible cooking. This she regarded as her proudest feat, for she frankly hated the domestic details of life; although after three years in a “Block”,—a sublimated lodging house, peculiar to the Northwest—she enjoyed the space and privacy of her home. Mark told his friends that his wife was the most remarkable woman in Montana, rarely found fault, save in the purely mechanical fashion of the married male, and paid the bills without a murmur. Altogether it was a reasonably happy marriage.

Ora Blake’s attitude to life at this time was expressed in the buoyancy of her step, the haughty carriage of her head, the cool bright casual glance she bestowed upon the world in general. Her code of morals, ethics, manners, as well as her acceptance of the last set of conditions she would have picked from the hands of Fate, was summed up in two words: noblesse oblige. Of her depths she knew as little as Gregory Compton of his.

“This is Mrs. Compton, I am sure,” she said in her cool even voice, as she came up behind the elaborately unconscious and humming Ida. “I am Mrs. Blake.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Ida formally, extending a limp hand. “Come on inside.”

Mrs. Blake closed her eyes as she entered the parlour, but opened them before Ida had adjusted the blower to the grate, and exclaimed brightly:

“How clever of you to settle so quickly. I shouldn’t have dared to call for another fortnight, but Mr. Compton told my husband yesterday that you were quite in order. It was three months before I dared open my doors.”

“Well,” drawled Ida, rocking herself, “I guess your friends are more critical than mine. And I guess you didn’t rely wholly on Butte for your furniture. I had Ma’s old junk, and the rest cost me just two hundred dollars.”

“How very clever of you!” But although Mrs. Blake was doing her best to be spontaneous and impressed, Ida knew instantly that she had committed a solecism, and felt both angry and apprehensive. She was more afraid of this young woman than of her professor. Once more she wished that Mrs. Blake and the whole caboodle would leave her alone till she was good and ready.

Ora hastened on to a safer topic, local politics. Butte, tired of grafting politicians, was considering the experiment of permitting a Socialist of good standing to be elected mayor. Ida, like all women of the smaller Western towns, was interested in local politics, and, glad of the impersonal topic, gave her visitor intelligent encouragement, the while she examined her critically. She finally summed her up in the word “pasty”, and at that stage of Ora Blake’s development the description was not inapt. She took little or no interest in her looks, although she dressed well by instinct; and nature, supplemented by her mother, had given her style. But her hair was almost colourless and worn in a tight knot just above her neck, her complexion was weather-beaten, her lips rather pale, and her body very thin. But when men whose first glance had been casual turned suddenly, wondering at themselves, to examine that face so lacking in the potencies of colouring, they discovered that the eyes, deeply set and far apart, were of a deep dark blazing grey, that the nose was straight and fine, the ears small, the mouth mobile, with a slight downward droop at the corners; also that her hands and feet were very slender, with delicate wrists and ankles. Ida, too, noted these points, but wondered where her “charm” came from. She knew that Mrs. Blake possessed this vague but desirable quality, in spite of her dread reputation as a “high-brow”, and her impersonal attitude toward men.

Ruby had informed her that the men agreed she had charm if she would only condescend to exert it. “And I can feel it too,” she had added, “every time I do her nails—she never lets anyone do that hair of hers or give her a massage, which she needs, the Lord knows. But she’s got fascination, magnetism, whatever you like to call it, for all she’s so washed-out. Somehow, I always feel that if she’d wake up, get on to herself, she’d play the devil with men, maybe with herself.”

Ida recalled the comments of the wise Miss Miller and frowned. This important feminine equipment she knew to be her very own, and although she would have been proud to admit the rivalry of a beautiful woman, she felt a sense of mortification in sharing that most subtle and fateful of all gifts, sex-magnetism, with one so colourless and plain. That the gifts possessed by this woman talking with such well-bred indifference of local affairs must be far more subtle than her own irritated her still more. It also filled her with a vague sense of menace, almost of helplessness. Later, when her brain was more accustomed to analysis, she knew that she had divined—her consciousness at that time too thick to formulate the promptings of instinct—that when man is taken unawares he is held more firmly captive.

Ida, staring into those brilliant powerful eyes, felt a sudden desperate need to dive through their depths into this woman’s secret mind, to know her better at once, get rid of the sense of mystery that baffled and oppressed her. In short she must know where she was at and know it quick. It did not strike her until afterward as odd that she should have felt so intensely personal in regard to a woman whose sphere was not hers and whose orbit had but just crossed her own.

For a time she floundered, but feminine instinct prompted the intimate note.

“I saw you talkin’—talking to the professor,” she said casually. “I suppose you know your husband got him for me.”

“I arranged it myself—” began Mrs. Blake, smiling, but Ida interrupted her sharply:

“Greg—Mr. Compton didn’t tell me he had talked to you about it.”

“Nor did he. I have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Compton but once—the day I married; he was my husband’s best man. Mark never can get him to come to the house, hardly to the club. But my husband naturally would turn over such a commission to me. I hope you found the little professor satisfactory.”

“He’ll do, I guess. He knows an awful lot, and I have a pretty good memory. But to get—and practice—it all—well, I guess that takes years.” She imbued her tones with a pathetic wistfulness, and gazed upon her visitor with ingenuous eyes, brimming with admiration. “It must be just grand to have got all that education, and to have lived in Europe while you were growing up. Nothing later on that you can get is the same, I guess. You look just about as polished off as I look raw.”

“Oh! No! No!” cried Ora deprecatingly, her cheeks flooding with a delicate pink that made her look very young and feminine. She had begun by disliking this dreadfully common person, but not only was she by no means as innocent of vanity as she had been trying for years to believe, but she was almost emotionally swift to respond to the genuine appeal. And, clever as she was, it was not difficult to delude her.

“Of course I had advantages that I am grateful for, but I have a theory that it is never too late to begin. And you are so young—a few months of our professor—are you really ambitious?”

“You bet.” Ida committed herself no further at the moment.

“Then you will enjoy study—expanding and furnishing your mind. It is a wonderful sensation!” Mrs. Blake’s eyes were flashing now, her mouth was soft, her strong little chin with that cleft which always suggests a whirlpool, was lifted as if she were drinking. “The moment you are conscious that you are using the magic keys to the great storehouses of the world, its arts, its sciences, its records of the past—when you begin to help yourself with both hands and pack it away in your memory—always something new—when you realise that the store is inexhaustible—that in study at least there is no ennui—Oh, I can give you no idea of what it all means—you will find it out for yourself!”

“Jimminy!” thought Ida. “I guess not! But that ain’t where her charm for men comes from, you bet!” Aloud she said, with awe in her voice:

“No wonder you know so much when you like it like that. But don’t it make you—well—kinder lonesome?”

“Sometimes—lately——” Mrs. Blake pulled herself up with a deep blush. “It has meant everything to me, that mental life, and it always shall!”

The astute Ida noted the defiant ring in her voice, and plunged in. “I wonder now? Say, you’re a pretty woman and a young one, and they say men would go head over ears about you if you’d give ’em a show. You’ve got a busy husband and so have I. Husbands don’t companion much and you can’t make me believe learning’s all. Don’t you wish these American Turks of husbands would let us have a man friend occasionally? They say that in high society in the East and in Europe, the women have all the men come to call on them afternoons they like, but the ordinary American husband, and particularly out West—Lord! When a woman has a man call on her, she’s about ready to split with her husband—belongs to the fast set—and he’s quail hunting somewheres else. Of course I’ve known Mark all my life—and you who was—were brought up in the real world—it must be awful hard on you. Wouldn’t you like to try your power once in a while, see how far you could go—just for fun? I guess you’re not shocked?”

“No, I’m not shocked,” said Ora, laughing. “But I don’t believe men interest me very much in that way—although, heaven knows, there are few more delightful sensations than talking to a man who makes you feel as if your brain were on fire. I don’t think I care to have American men, at least, become interested in me in any other way. In Europe——” She hesitated, and Ida leaned forward eagerly.

“Oh, do tell me, Mrs. Blake! I don’t know a blamed thing. I’ve never been outside of Montana.”

“Well—I mean—the American man takes love too seriously. I suppose it is because he is so busy—he has to take life so seriously. He specialises intensely. It is all or nothing with him. Of course I am talking about love. When they play about, it is generally with a class of women of which we have no personal knowledge. The European, with his larger leisure, and generations of leisure in his brain, his interest in everything, and knowledge of many things,—above all of the world,—has reduced gallantry to a fine art. He may give his fancy, his sentiment, his passion, even his leisure, to one woman at a time, but his heart—well, unless he is very young—that remains quite intact. Love is the game of his life with a change of partner at reasonable intervals. In other words he is far too accomplished and sophisticated to be romantic. Now, your American man, although he looks the reverse of romantic, and is always afraid of making a fool of himself, when he does fall in love with a woman—say, across a legal barrier—must annihilate the barrier at once; in other words, elope or rush to the divorce court. It isn’t that he is more averse from a liaison than the European, but more thorough. It is all or nothing. In many respects he is far finer than the European, but he makes for turmoil, and, less subtle, he fails to hold our interest.”

“You mean he don’t keep us guessing? Well, you’re right about most of them. I never saw a boy I couldn’t read like a page ad., until I met my husband. I thought I knew him, too, till I’d been married to him awhile. But, my land, he gets deeper every minute. I guess if I hadn’t married him he’d have kidnapped me, he was that gone, and forgetting anything else existed. Of course, I didn’t expect that to last, but I did think he’d go on being transparent. But, believe me, the Sphinx ain’t a patch on him. I sometimes think I don’t know him at all, and that keeps me interested.”

“I should think it might!” exclaimed Mrs. Blake, thinking of her own standard possession. “But then Mr. Compton is a hard student, and is said to have a voracious as well as a brilliant mind. No doubt that is the secret of what appears on the surface as complexity and secretiveness. I know the symptoms!”

“P’raps. But—well, I live with him, and I suspicion otherwise. I suspect him of having as many kind of leads, and cross-cuts, and ‘pockets’, and veins full of different kinds of ore in him as we’ve got right under our feet in Butte Hill. Do you think”—she spoke with a charming wistfulness—“that when I know more, have opened up and let out my top story, as it were, I shall understand him better?”

And again Ora responded warmly, “Indeed, yes, dear Mrs. Compton. It isn’t so much what you put into your mind—it’s more the reflex action of that personal collection in developing not only the mental faculties, but one’s intuitions, one’s power to understand others—even one whose interests are different, or whose knowledge is infinitely greater than our own.”

“I believe you could even understand Greg!” Ida spoke involuntarily and stared with real admiration at the quickened face with its pink cheeks and flashing eyes, its childish mobile mouth. Ora at the moment looked beautiful. Suddenly Ida felt as if half-drowned in a wave of ambiguous terror. She sat up very straight.

“I guess you’re right,” she said slowly. “You’ve made me see it as the others haven’t. I’ll work at all that measly little professor gives me, but—I don’t know—somehow, I can’t think he’ll do much more than make me talk decent. There’s nothing to him.”

Ora’s heart beat more quickly. Her indifference had vanished in this intimate hour, also her first subtle dislike of Ida, who’s commonness now seemed picturesque, and whose wistful almost complete ignorance had made a strong appeal to her sympathies. For the first time in her lonely life she felt that she had something to give. And here was raw and promising material ready and eager to be woven, if not into cloth of silver, at least into a quality of merchandise vastly superior to that which the rude loom of youth had so far produced. All she knew of Gregory Compton, moreover, made her believe in and admire him; the loneliness of his mental life with this woman appalled her. This was not the first time she had been forced to admit of late that under the cool bright surface of her nature were more womanly impulses than formerly, a spontaneous warmth that was almost like the quickening of a child; but she had turned from the consciousness with an impatient: “What nonsense! What on earth should I do with it?” The sense that she was of no vital use to anyone had discouraged her, dimmed her interest in her studies. Her husband could hire a better housekeeper, find a hundred girls who would companion him better. And what if she were instruite? So were thousands of women. Nothing was easier.

But this clever girl of the people, who might before many years had passed be one of the rich and conspicuous women of the United States, above all, the wife of one of the nation’s “big men,” working himself beyond human capacity, harassed, needing not only physical comfort at home, but counsel, companionship, perfect understanding,—might it not be her destiny to equip Ida Compton for her double part? Ora’s imagination, the most precious and the most dangerous of her gifts, was at white heat. To her everlasting credit would be the fashioning of a helpmate for one of her country’s great men. It would be enough to do as much for the state which her imperfect father had loved so passionately; but her imagination would not confine Gregory Compton within the limitations of a state. It was more than likely that his destiny would prove to be national; and she had seen the wives of certain men eminent in political Washington, but of obscure origin. They were Ida’s mannered, grooved, crystallised; women to flee from.

She leaned forward and took Ida’s hand in both of hers. “Dear Mrs. Compton!” she exclaimed. “Do let me teach you what little I know. I mean of art—history—the past—the present—I have portfolios of beautiful photographs of great pictures and scenes that I collected for years in Europe. It will do me so much good to go over them. I haven’t had the courage to look at them for years. And the significant movements, social, political, religious,—all this theft under so many different names,—Christian Science, the ‘Uplift’ Movement, Occultism—from the ancient Hindu philosophy—it would be delightful to go into it with someone. I am sure I could make it all most interesting to you.”

“My Gorrd!” thought Ida. “Two of ’em! What am I let in for?” But the undefined sharp sense of terror lingered, and she answered when she got her breath,

“I’d like it first rate. The work in this shack is nothing. Mr. Compton leaves first thing in the morning, and don’t show up till nearly six. The professor’s coming for an hour every other afternoon. But if I go to your house I want it understood that I don’t meet anyone else. I’ve got my reasons.”

“You shall not meet a soul. Can’t you imagine how sick I am of Butte? We’ll have heavenly times. I was wondering only the other day of what use was all this heterogeneous mass of stuff I’d put into my head. But,” she added gaily, “I know now it was for you to select from. I am so glad. And—and——” Her keen perceptions suggested a more purely feminine bait. “You were with Madame O’Reilley, were you not? I get my things from a very good dressmaker in New York. Perhaps you would like to copy some of them?”

“Aw! Would I?” Ida gasped and almost strangled. For the first time during this the most trying day of her life she felt wholly herself. “You may just bet your life I would. I need new duds the worst way, even if I’m not a West Sider. I’ve been on a ranch for nearly a year and a half, and although Mr. Compton won’t take me to any balls, there are the movin’ pictures and the mats—matinees; and the street, where I have to show up once in a while! I used to think an awful lot of my looks and style, and I guess it’s time to begin again. I can sew first rate, make any old thing. Do you mean it?”

“Indeed I do! I want to be of help to you in every way.” She rose and held Ida’s hand once more in hers, although she did not kiss her as another woman might have done. “Will you come tomorrow—about two?”

“You may bet your bottom dollar I’ll come. I haven’t thanked you, but maybe I’ll do that some other way.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mrs. Blake lightly.

IX

BUTTE, “the richest hill in the world” (known at a period when less famous for metals and morals as “Perch of the Devil”), is a long scraggy ridge of granite and red and grey dirt rising abruptly out of a stony uneven plain high in the Rocky Mountains. The city is scooped out of its south slope, and overflows upon The Flat. Big Butte, an equally abrupt protuberance, but higher, steeper, more symmetrical, stands close beside the treasure vault, but with the aloof and somewhat cynical air of even the apocryphal volcano. On all sides the sterile valley heaves away as if abruptly arrested in a throe of the monstrous convulsion that begat it; but pressing close, cutting the thin brilliant air with its icy peaks, is an irregular and nearly circular chain of mountains, unbroken white in winter, white on the blue enamelled slopes in summer.

For nearly half the year the whole scene is white, with not a tree, nor, beyond the straggling town itself, a house to break its frozen beauty. It is only when the warm Chinook wind roars in from the west and melts the snow much as lightning strikes, or when Summer herself has come, that you realize the appalling surface barrenness of this region devastated for many years by the sulphur and arsenic fumes of ore roasted in the open or belching from the smelters. They ate up the vegetation, and the melting snows and heavy June rains washed the weakened earth from the bones of valley and mountain, leaving both as stark as they must have been when the earth ceased to rock and began to cool. Since the smelters have gone to Anaconda, patches of green, of a sad and timid tenderness, like the smile of a child too long neglected, have appeared between the sickly grey boulders of the foothills, and, in Butte, lawns as large as a tablecloth have been cultivated. Anaconda Hill at the precipitous eastern end of the city, with its tangled mass of smokestacks, gallows-frames, shabby grey buildings, trestles, looks like a gigantic shipwreck, but is merely the portal to the precious ore bodies of the mines whose shafts, levels, and cross-cuts to the depth of three thousand feet and more, pierce and ramify under city and valley. These hideous buildings through which so many hundreds of millions have passed, irrupt into the very back yards of some of the homes, built too far east (and before mere gold and silver gave place to copper); but the town improves as it leaps westward. The big severe solid buildings to be found in every modern city sure of its stability crowd the tumble-down wood structures of a day when no man looked upon Butte as aught but a camp. And although the streets are vociferously cobbled, the pavements are civilised here and there.

Farther west the houses of the residence section grow more and more imposing, coinciding with the sense of Butte’s inevitableness. On the high western rim of the city (which exteriorly has as many ups and downs as the story of its vitals) stands the red School of Mines. It has a permanent expression of surprise, natural to a bit of Italian renaissance looking down upon Butte.

Some of the homes, particularly those of light pressed brick, and one that looks like the northeast corner of the upper story of a robber stronghold of the middle ages, are models of taste and not too modest symbols of wealth; but north and south and east and west are the snow wastes in winter and the red or grey untidy desert of sand and rock in summer.

But if Butte is the ugliest city in the United States, she knows how to make amends. She is alive to her finger-tips. Her streets, her fine shops, her hotels, her great office buildings, are always swarming and animated. At no time, not even in the devitalised hours that precede the dawn, does she sink into that peace which even a metropolis welcomes. She has the jubilant expression of one who coins the very air, the thin, sparkling, nervous air, into shining dollars, and, confident in the inexhaustible riches beneath her feet, knows that she shall go on coining them forever. Even the squads of miners, always, owing to the three shifts, to be seen on the street corners, look satisfied and are invariably well-dressed. Not only do these mines with their high wages and reasonable hours draw the best class of workingmen, but there are many college men in them, many more graduates from the High Schools of Montana. The “Bohunks,” or “dark men,” an inferior class of Southern Europeans, who live like pigs and send their wages home, rarely if ever are seen in these groups.

And if Butte be ugly, hopelessly, uncompromisingly ugly, her compensation is akin to that of many an heiress: she never forgets that she is the richest hill in the world. Even the hard grip of the most unassailable trust in America, which has absorbed almost as much of Montana’s surface as of its hidden treasure, does not interfere with her prosperity or supreme complacency. And although she has her pestilential politicians, her grafters and crooks, and is so tyrannically unionized that the workingman groans under the yoke of his brother and forgets to curse the trust, yet ability and talent make good as always; and in that electrified city of permanent prosperity there is a peculiar condition that offsets its evils: it is a city of sudden and frequent vacancies. New York, Europe, above all, California, swarm with former Montanans, particularly of Butte, who have coppered their nests, and transplanted them with a still higher sense of achievement.

Ora was thinking of Butte and the world beyond Butte, as she splashed along through the suddenly melted snow toward her home on the West Side. The Chinook, loud herald from Japan, had swept down like an army in the night and turned the crisp white streets to rivers of mud. But Ora wore stout walking boots, and her short skirt, cut by a master hand, was wide enough to permit the impatient stride she never had been able to modify in spite of her philosophy and the altitude. She walked several miles a day and in all weathers short of a blizzard; but not until the past few weeks with the admission that her increasing restlessness, her longing for Europe, was growing out of bonds. She wondered today if it were Europe she wanted, or merely a change.

She had, of course, no money of her own, and never had ceased to be grateful that her husband’s prompt and generous allowance made it unnecessary to ask alms of him. Three times since her marriage he had suddenly presented her with a check for several hundred dollars and told her to “give her nerves a chance” either down “on the coast,” or in New York. She had always fled to New York, remained a month or six weeks, gone day and night to opera, theatre, concerts, art exhibitions, not forgetting her tailor and dressmaker; returning to Butte as refreshed as if she had taken her heart and nerves, overworked by the altitude, down to the poppy fields of Southern California.

Her vacations and her husband’s never coincided. Mark always departed at a moment’s notice for Chicago or New York, alleging pressing business. He returned, after equally pressing delays, well, complacent, slightly apologetic.

Ora knew that she had but to ask permission to spend the rest of the winter in New York, for not only was Mark the most indulgent of husbands, but he was proud of his wife’s connections in the American Mecca, not unwilling to read references in the Butte newspapers to her sojourn among them. The “best people” of these Western towns rarely have either friends or relatives in the great cities of the East. The hardy pioneer is not recruited from the aristocracies of the world, and the dynamic men and women that have made the West what it is have the blood of the old pioneers in them.

Ora was one of the few exceptions. Her father had been the last of a distinguished line of jurists unbroken since Jonathan Stratton went down with Alexander Hamilton in the death struggle between the Federal and the new Republican party. Ora’s mother, one of New York’s imported beauties for a season, who had languished theretofore on the remnants of a Louisiana plantation, impecunious and ambitious, but inexperienced and superficially imaginative, married the handsome and brilliant lawyer for love, conceiving that it would be romantic to spend a few years in a mining camp, where she, indubitably, would be its dominant lady. Butte did not come up to her ideas of romance. Nor had she found it possible to dislodge the passively determined women with the pioneer blood in their veins. The fumes afflicted her delicate lungs, the altitude her far more delicate nerves. Judge Stratton deposited her in the drawing-room of an eastern bound train with increasing relish. Had it not been for his little girl he would have bade her upon the second or third of these migrations to establish herself in Paris and return no more.

During these long pilgrimages Ora, even while attending school in New York, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vevey, had seen something of society, for Mrs. Stratton was ever surrounded by it, and did not approve of the effect of boarding school diet on the complexion. But the ardours of her mind, encouraged always by her father, who never was too busy to write to her, had made her indifferent to the advantages prized by Mrs. Stratton.

Today she was conscious of a keen rebellious desire for something more frivolous, light, exciting, than had entered her life for many a year. There can be little variety and no surprises in the social life of a small community—for even scandal and divorce grow monotonous—and although she could always enjoy an hour’s intellectual companionship with the professors of the School of Mines, whenever it pleased her to summon them, Ora, for the first time in her twenty-six years, had drifted into a condition of mind where intellectual revels made no appeal to her whatever.

She had wondered before this if her life would have been purely mental had her obligations been different, but had dismissed the thought as not only dangerous but ungrateful. She had reason to go on her knees to her intellect, its ambitions and its furniture, for without it life would have been insupportable. She ordered her quickening ego back to the rear, or the depths, or wherever it bided its time, none too amenable; she was only beginning to guess the proportions it might assume if encouraged; the vague phantoms floating across her mind, will-o’-the-wisps in a fog bank, frightened her. Several months since she had set her lips, and her mind the task of acquiring the Russian language. It had always been her experience that nothing compared with a new language as a mental usurper.

She had entered into a deliberate partnership with a man who protected and supported her, and she would keep the letter, far as its spirit might be beyond the reach of her will. Even were she to become financially independent, it was doubtful if she would leave him for a long period; and for New York and its social diversions she cared not at all. What she wanted was adventure—she stumbled on the word, and stopped with a gasp. Adventure. For the first time she wished she were a man. She would pack two mules with a prospector’s outfit and disappear into the mountains.

She swung her mind to the Russian grammar, enough to impale it in the death agony; but when she had entered her home, and, after a visit to her leisurely cook, who was a unionized socialist, ascended to her bedroom and stood before her mirror, she decided that it was her singular interview with the wife of Gregory Compton that had thrown her mind off its delicate balance. She recalled that Mrs. Compton—certainly an interesting creature in spite of her appalling commonness—had told her flagrantly that she was young, pretty, and attractive to men, even as are young and pretty women without too much brains. The compliment—or was it the suggestion?—had thrilled her, and it thrilled her again. Men sometimes had tried to make love to her, but she had ascribed such charm as she appeared to possess to the automatically vibrating magnet of youth; and although she had never been above a passing flirtation, either in her mother’s salon or in Butte, she merely had been bored if the party of the other part had taken his courage in his hands on the morrow. Scruples did not trouble her. The American woman, she would have reasoned, is traditionally “cold.” American men, brought up on her code of ethics, are able to take care of themselves.

Had she been superficial in her conclusions? Could she attract men more potently than by a merely girlish charm and a vivacious mind? Her memory ran rapidly over the functions of the winter, particularly the dinners and dances. She could not recall a passing conquest. She was angry to feel herself shiver, but she jerked off her hat, and the pins out of her fine abundant hair. She was twenty-six. Had she gone off? Faded? She never had been called a beauty, never had had the vanity to think herself a beauty, but she remembered that sometimes in an animated company she had glanced into the passing mirror and thought herself quite pretty, with her pink cheeks and sparkling eyes. But normally she was too washed-out for beauty, however good her features might be, and of course she had no figure at all. She dressed well from force of habit, and she had the carriage at least to set off smartly cut garments, but as much might be said of a dressmaker’s “form.”

And her skin was sallow and sunburned and weather-beaten and dry, as any neglected skin in a high altitude is sure to be. Once it had been as white as her native snows. Her hair, also the victim of the high dry air, and exposed to the elements for hours together, was more colourless than Nature had made it—dull—dead. She held out a strand in dismay, remembering how her cendré hair had been admired in Paris; then with a sudden sense of relief (it escaped from the cellar where her ego was immured on bread and water) she informed herself that it was her duty to invoke the services of Miss Ruby Miller. No woman with proper pride—or self-respect—would let her skin go to pot, no, not at any age; certainly not at twenty-six. She recalled an impulsive remark of Miss Miller’s a few months since when arranging her hair for a fancy-dress ball, and gave another sigh—of hope.

So does Nature avenge herself.

X

SHE heard her husband’s voice as he entered the house, and hastily changed her walking suit for one of the soft tea gowns she wore when they were alone. This was a simple thing of a Copenhagen-blue silk, with a guimpe of fine white net, and trimmed about the neck and half sleeves with the newest and softest of the year’s laces. She noticed with some satisfaction that her neck, below the collar line, was very white; and she suddenly covered the rest of it with powder, then rubbed the puff over her face. It was ordinary “baby powder” for the bath, for she never had indulged in toilet accessories, but it answered its purpose, if only to demonstrate what she might have been had she safeguarded the gifts of nature. And the dull blue gown was suddenly becoming.

Her husband, who had spent the intervening time in the library, ran upstairs whistling in spite of his girth—he was the lightest dancer in Butte—and knocked on her door before going to his own room.

“Say,” he said, as he chucked her under the chin, and kissed her maritally, “but you look all right. Run down stairs and hold your breath until I’ve made myself beautiful. I’ve got big news for you.”

She rustled softly down the stair, wondering what the news might be, but not unduly interested. Mark was always excited over his new cases. Perhaps he had been retained by Amalgamated. She hoped so. He deserved it, for he worked harder than anyone knew. And she liked him sincerely, quite without mitigation now that the years had taught him the folly of being in love with her.

And he certainly had given her a pretty home. The house was not large enough to be pointed out by the conductor of the “Seeing Butte Car,” but it had been designed by a first rate architect, and had a certain air of spaciousness within. Mrs. Stratton had furnished a flat in Paris two years before her husband’s death, her excuse being that the interior of the Butte house got on her nerves, and there was no other way to take in household goods free of duty. Ora had shipped them when the news of her father’s death and their own poverty came, knowing that she would get a better price for the furniture in Butte, where someone always was building, than in Paris.

Before it arrived she had made up her mind to marry Mark Blake, and although it was several years before they had a house she kept it in storage. In consequence her little drawing-room with its gay light formal French furniture was unique in Butte, city of substantial and tasteful (sometimes) but quite unindividual homes. Mark was thankful that he was light of foot, less the bull in the china shop than he looked, and would have preferred red walls, an oriental divan and Persian rugs. He felt more at home in the library, a really large room lined from floor to ceiling not only with Ora’s but Judge Stratton’s books, which Mark had bought for a song at the auction; and further embellished with deep leather chairs and several superb pieces of carved Italian furniture. Ora spent the greater part of her allowance on books, and many hours of her day in this room. But tonight she deliberately went into the frivolous French parlour, turned on all the lights, and sat down to await her husband’s reappearance.

Mark, who had taken kindly to the idea of dressing for dinner, came running downstairs in a few moments.

“In the doll’s house?” he called out, as he saw the illumination in the drawing-room. “Oh, come on into a real room and mix me a cocktail.”

“It isn’t good for you to drink cocktails so long before eating; Huldah, who receives ‘The People’s War Cry’ on Monday, informed me that dinner would be half an hour late.”

“I wish you’d chuck that wooden-faced leaden-footed apology for a servant. This is the third time——”

“And get a worse? Butte rains efficient servants! Please sit down. I—feel like this room tonight. You may smoke.”

“Thanks. I believe this is the first time you have given me permission. But I’m bound to say the room suits you.”

Ora sat in a chaise-longue of the XV^me Siècle, a piece of furniture whose awkward grace gives a woman’s arts full scope. Much exercise had preserved the natural suppleness of Ora’s body and she had ancestral memories of all arts and wiles. Mark seated himself on the edge of a stiff little sofa covered with faded Aubusson tapestry, and hunched his shoulders.

“If the French women furnish their rooms like this I don’t believe all that’s said about them,” he commented wisely. “Men like to be comfortable even when they’re looking at a pretty woman.”

“Mama let me choose the furniture for this room, and I wasn’t thinking much about your sex at the time. I—I think it expressed a side of me that I wasn’t conscious of then.”

“It’s a pretty room all right.” Mark lit the consolatory cigarette. “But not to sit in. What struck you tonight?”

“Oh, I’d been thinking of Paris.”

Mark’s face was large and round and bland; it was only when he drew his brows together that one saw how small and sharp his eyes were.

“H’m. I’ve wondered sometimes if you weren’t hankering after Europe. I suppose it gets into the blood.”

“Oh, yes, it gets into the blood!” Ora spoke lightly, but she was astonished at his insight.

“I’ve never been able to send you—not as you were used to going—I don’t see you doing anything on the cheap——”

“Oh, my dear Mark, you are goodness itself. I’ve thought very little about it, really.”

“Suppose you found yourself suddenly rich, would you light out and leave me?”

“We’d go together. It would be great fun being your cicerone.”

“No chance! I’m going to be a rich man inside the next ten years, and here I stick. And I don’t see myself travelling on a woman’s money, either. But I suppose you’d be like all the rest if you could afford it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Of course I look forward to spending a year in Europe once more—I’d hardly be human if I didn’t. But I can wait for you.”

“I’ve always admired your philosophy,” he said grimly. “And now I’ve got a chance to put it to a real test. I believe you are in a way, if not to be rich, at least to make a pretty good haul.”

“What do you mean?” Ora sat up straight.

“Your father made a good many wild-cat investments when he first came out here, and the one he apparently thought the worst, for I found no mention of it among his papers, was the Oro Fino Primo mine, which he bought from a couple of sharks in the year you were born—that’s where you got your name, I guess. One of the men was a well known prospector and the Judge thought he was safe. The ore assayed about eighty dollars a ton, so he took over the claim, paid the Lord knows how much to the prospector, who promptly lit out, had it patented, and set a small crew to work under a manager. They found nothing but low grade ore, which in those days roused about as much enthusiasm as country rock. The mine had been salted, of course. It was some time before your father would give up, and he spent more than the necessary amount of money to perfect the patent; always hoping. When he was finally convinced there was nothing in it he quit. And it was characteristic of your father that when he quit he quit for good. He simply dismissed the thing from his mind. Well, times have changed since then. New processes and more railroads have caused fortunes to be made out of low grade ore when there is enough of it. Some people would rather have a big lode of low grade ore than a pockety vein of rich quartz. As you know, abandoned mines are being leased all over the state, and abandoned prospect holes investigated. Well, there you are. This morning two mining engineers from New York came into my office with a tale of woe. They came out here to look about, and after considerable travel within a reasonable distance of railroads found an old prospect hole with a shaft sunk about fifty feet. It looked abandoned all right, but as the dump was still there and they liked the looks of it they went to the De Smet ranch house—the hole is just over the border of Greg’s ranch—and made inquiries. Oakley, who is a monomaniac on the subject of intensive farming and doesn’t know a mine from a gopher hole, told them that the adjacent land belonged to no one but the government. So they staked their claim, recorded it in Virginia City, retimbered the shaft and sank it twenty feet deeper. They began to take out ore that looked good for fifteen dollars a ton. Then along comes an old prospector and tells them the story of the mine. They leave their two miners on the job and post up to Helena to have the records examined in the Land Office. There, sure enough, they find that the mine was duly patented by Judge Stratton, and all of the government requirements complied with. So they come to me. They want a bond and lease for three years—which means they may have the privilege of buying at the end of the lease—and offer you ten per cent. on the net proceeds. I haven’t given them my answer yet, for I’m going to take Greg out there next Sunday and have a look at it. There was a sort of suppressed get-rich-quickishness in their manner, and their offer was not what you would call munificent. Greg is a born geologist, to say nothing of his training. I don’t mean so much in the School of Mines, but he was always gophering about with old prospectors, and ran away into the mountains several times when his father was alive. Never showed up all summer. He’s at ore now every spare moment he gets, and is as good an assayer as there is in the state. If there’s mineral on his own ranch he’ll find it, and if there isn’t he’ll find it elsewhere. So, I do nothing till he’s looked the property over. But in any case I think I can promise you a good lump of money.”

Ora’s breath was short. Her face had been scarlet for a few moments but now showed quite pale under the tan and powder. When her husband finished, however, and she replied, “How jolly,” her voice was quite steady.

“And shall you fly off and leave me if it pans out?”

“Of course not. What do you take me for?”

“To tell you the truth it will mean a good deal to me if you stay until the fall. I’ve a client coming out here from New York whom I am trying to persuade to buy the old Iron Hat mine. There’s a fortune in it for anyone with money enough to spend rebuilding the old works and putting in new machinery and timbers; and a big rake-off for me, if I put the deal through. Well, this client figures to bring his wife and daughter, and you could help me a lot—persuade them they’d have the time of their lives if they spent several months of every year out here for a while—he’s a domestic sort of man. After that take a flyer if you like. You deserve it.”

“How nice of you! Here is dinner at last.” Ora felt almost physically sick, so dazzling had been the sudden prospect of deliverance, followed by the certainty, even before her husband asked for the diplomatic assistance she so often had given him, that she could not take advantage of it. Noblesse oblige! For the moment she hated her watchword.

She mixed a cocktail with steady hand. “I’ll indulge in a perfect orgie of clothes!” she said gaily. “And import a chef. By the way,” she added, as she seated herself at the table and straightened the knives and forks beside her plate, “what do you think I let myself in for today?”

“Not been speculating? There’s a quart of Worcestershire in this soup.”

“I’ll certainly treat you to a chef. No, not speculating—I wonder if it mightn’t be that? I called on your friend’s wife——”

“Good girl! She’s not your sort, but she’s Greg’s wife——”

“I thought she was quite terrible at first, but I soon became interested. She’s clever in her way, ignorant as she is, and has individuality. Before I knew it I had offered to take a hand in her education——”

“Good lord! What sort of a hand?”

“Oh, just showing her my portfolios, giving her some idea of art. It sounds very elemental, but one must begin somewhere. She knows so little that it will be like teaching a child a b c.”

“I’m afraid it will bore you.”

“No, I like the idea. It is something new, and change is good for the soul. I have an idea that I shall continue to find her as interesting as I intend she shall find the ‘lessons’.”

“She’ll get more than lessons on art. She’ll get a good tone down, and she needs that all right. Poor old Greg! He deserved the best and he got Ida Hook. I tried to head him off but I might as well have tried to head off a stampede to a new gold diggings. He ought to have married a lady, that’s what.”

Ora glanced up quickly, then, thankful that her husband was intent upon his carving, dropped her eyes. It was the first time he had ever hinted at the differences of class. In his boyhood there had been a mighty gulf between his mother and the haughty Mrs. Stratton who employed her in what was then the finest house in Butte. But he was too thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the West, in which he had spent his life, to recognise any difference in class save that which was determined by income. As soon as his own abilities, industry, and the turn of Fortune’s wheel, placed him in a position to offer support to the two dainty women that had been his ideals from boyhood, he knew himself to be their equal, without exhausting himself in analysis.

As for Ora, the West was quick in her blood, in spite of her heritage and education. Her father had assumed the virtue of democracy when he settled in Montana. In the course of a few years a genuine liking and enthusiasm for his adopted state, as well as daily associations, transformed him into as typical a Westerner as the West ever turned out of her ruthless crucible. He even wore a Stetson hat when he visited New York. His wife’s “airs” had inspired him with an increasing disgust which was one of the most honest emotions of his life, and the text of his repeated warnings to his daughter, whom he was forced to leave to the daily guidance of his legal wife (Ora’s continued presence in Butte, would, in truth, have caused him much embarrassment), had been to cherish her Western birthright as the most precious of her possessions.

“Remember this is the twentieth century,” he had written to her not long before his death. “There is no society in the world today that cannot be invaded by a combination of money, brains, and a certain social talent—common enough. The modern man, particularly in the United States, makes himself. His ancestors count for nothing, if he doesn’t. If he does they may be a good asset, for they (possibly) have given him breeding ready-made, moral fibre, and a brain of better composition than the average man of the people can expect. But that is only by the way. The two most potent factors in the world today are money and the waxing, rising, imperishable democratic spirit. That was reborn out here in the West, and the West is invading and absorbing the East. The old un-American social standards of the East are expiring in the present generation, which resort to every absurdity to maintain them; its self-consciousness betraying its recognition of the inevitable. Twenty years hence this class will be, if still clinging to its spar, as much of a national joke as the Western women were when they first flashed their diamonds in Peacock Alley. That phase, you may notice, is so dead that the comic papers have forgotten it. The phase was inevitable, but our women are now so accustomed to their money that they are not to be distinguished from wealthy women anywhere except that their natural hospitality and independence make them seem more sure of themselves. Of course the innately vulgar are to be found everywhere, and nowhere more abundantly than in New York.

“Twenty years from now, the West will have overrun the East; it will have helped itself with both hands to all the older civilisation has to give, and it will have made New York as democratic as Butte—or London! So don’t let yourself grow up with any old-fashioned nonsense in your head. I want you to start out in life modern to the core, unhampered by any of the obsolete notions that make your mother and most of our relations a sort of premature has-beens. When your time comes to marry, select a Western man who either has made his own fortune or has the ability to make it. Don’t give a thought to his origin if his education is good, and his manners good enough. You can supply the frills. I wouldn’t have you marry a man that lacked the fundamentals of education at least, but better that than one whose brain is so full of old-fashioned ideas that it has no room for those that are born every minute. And I hope you will settle here in this state and do something for it, either through the abilities of the man you marry or with your own. It isn’t only the men that build up a new state. And if you marry a foreigner never let me see nor hear from you again. They are all very well in their way, but it is not our way.”

Ora, who had worshipped her father and admired him above all men, never forgot a word he uttered, and knew his letters by heart. Possibly it was the memory of this last of his admonitions which had enabled her to sustain the shock of a proposal from the son of her mother’s old seamstress and of a miner who had died in his overalls underground. It is doubtful if she would have been conscious of the shock had it not been for Mrs. Stratton’s lamentations. That lady from her sofa in one of the humbler Blocks, had sent wail after wail in the direction of the impertinent aspirant. Ora, during the brief period in which she made her decision, heard so much about the “bluest blood of the South,” and the titled foreigners whom she apparently could have had for the accepting when she was supposed to belong to the Millionaire Sisterhood, that she began to ponder upon the violent contrasts embodied in Mark with something like rapture. After the marriage was accomplished, Mrs. Stratton had the grace to wail in solitude, and shortly after moved on to a world where only the archangels are titled and never have been known to marry. Ora had not given the matter another thought. Mark had been carefully brought up by a refined little woman, his vicious tendencies had been negligible, and he was too keen to graduate from the High School and make his start in life to waste time in even the milder forms of dissipation. When he married he adapted himself imperceptibly to the new social world he entered; if not a Beau Brummel, nor an Admirable Crichton, he never would disgrace his aristocratic wife; and, unlike Judge Stratton, he wore a silk hat in New York.

His last remark apparently had been a mere vapour from his subconscious mind, for he went on as soon as he had taken the edge from his appetite, “Perhaps Ida Hook can be made into one. I’ve seen waitresses and chambermaids metamorphosed by a million or two so that their own husbands wouldn’t recognise them if they stayed away too long. But it takes time, and Ida has an opinion of herself that would make an English duchess feel like a slag dump. Say—do you know it was through me Greg met her? It was that week you were out on the Kelley ranch. I met two or three of the old crowd on the street and nothing would do but that I should go to their picnic for the sake of old times. Greg was in town and I persuaded him to come along. Didn’t want to, but I talked him over. Guess there’s no escaping our fate. Possibly I couldn’t have corralled him if it hadn’t been for reaction—he’d been whooping it up on The Flat. Well, I wished afterward that I’d left him to play the wheel and all the rest of it for a while longer. Greg never loses his head—that is to say he never did till he met Ida Hook. The sporting life never took a hold on him, for while he went in for it with the deep deliberation that was born in him, it’s just that deliberation that saves him from going too far. He cuts loose the minute he figured out beforehand to cut loose, and all the king’s horses—or all the other attractions—couldn’t make him put in another second. A girl shot herself one night out at the Five Mile House because he suddenly said good-bye and turned on his heel. She knew he meant it. He never even turned round when he heard her drop——”

“What a brute!”

“Greg? Not he. I’ve known him to sit up all night with a sick dog——”

“I hate people that are kind to animals and cruel to one another.”

“Greg isn’t cruel. He said he was going and he went; that’s all. It’s his way. Girls of that kind are trash, anyhow, and when a woman goes into the sporting life she knows enough to take sporting chances.”

“You are as bad as he.”

Mark stared at her in open-eyed amazement. He never had seen her really roused before. “Don’t you bother your dear little head,” he said soothingly. “Angels like you don’t know anything about that sort of life—and don’t need to.”

Ora’s anger vanished in laughter. “Well, suppose you give me a hint about his wife. I really am interested, and delighted at the prospect of being of some use in the world.”

“You’re all right! Ida—well, I guess you’ll do a lot for her, by just having her round. She’s no fool—and she certainly is a looker. If you tone her down and polish her up I’ll feel it’s a sort of favour to myself. Greg’ll be one of the richest men in this country some day,—if he has to walk over a few thousand fellow citizens to get there—and I don’t want to see him queered by a woman. Seen that before.”

“I intend to do my best, but for her sake, not his——”

“Say!” It was patent that Mark had an inspiration. “Why not take Ida with you to Europe? I don’t like the idea of a dainty little thing like you” (Ora was five feet six) “travelling alone, and a husky girl like Ida could take care of you while putting on a few coats of European polish. Greg can afford it; he must have cleared a good many thousands on his ranch during the last two years, besides what I’ve turned over for him; and he can live here with me and get all the comforts of home. I’ll let you off for six months. What do you say?”

Ora was looking at him with pink cheeks and bright eyes. “You are sure you won’t mind?”

“I’ll miss you like fun, of course; especially when you look as pretty as you do this minute, but I think it would be a good thing for you and better for Ida—and I’ll fire this cook.”

“Will Mr. Compton give his consent?”

“No one on God’s earth would take chances on what Gregory Compton would do until he had done it, but I don’t mind throwing a guess that he could live without Ida for six months and not ask me to dry his tears. And there isn’t a mean bone in his body.”

“It would interest me immensely to take Mrs. Compton abroad. Now hurry if you expect to get a seat at one of the bridge tables. It is late——”

“I rather thought I’d like to stay and talk to you——”

“How polite of you! But I’m tired out and going straight to bed. So toddle along.”

XI

“TAILORED suits have to be made by a tailor, but I’d like first rate to copy this one you call a little afternoon frock. It’s got the style all right, and I could get some cheap nice-looking stuff.”

Ida was gloating over Ora’s limited but fashionable wardrobe, and while she held the smart afternoon frock out at arm’s length, her eye wandered to an evening gown of blue satin and chiffon that lay over the back of a chair.

“Glory!” she sighed. “But I’d like to wear a real gown like that. Low-neck, short sleeves! I’ve got the neck and arms too, you bet——”

“Why not copy it?” Ora was full of enthusiasm once more. “You can do it here, and I have an excellent seamstress——”

“Where’d I wear a rig like that? Even if I made it in China silk and Greg took me anywheres, I couldn’t. We don’t go in for real low necks in our bunch.”

“But surely you’ll go to the Junior Prom?”

Ida opened her mouth as well as her eyes. “The Junior Prom? I never thought of it. Of course I’d be asked, Greg being in the Junior Class and all——”

“Naturally.”

Ida frowned. “Well, I ain’t going. I said I wouldn’t go anywheres—to any swell blowouts, until I’m as big as anybody there.”

“But the School of Mines is composed of young men of all classes. Each asks his friends. The Prom is anything but an exclusive affair. You go out to the Garden dances on Friday nights in summer?”

“Oh, in that jam—and everybody wearing their suits, or any old thing——”

“Well, I think you should go to the Prom. Mr. Compton is the star pupil in the School of Mines. The professors talk of no one else. I rather think your absence would cause comment.”

“Well—maybe I’ll go. I’d like to all right. But I can’t wear low-neck. I guess you know it wouldn’t do.”

“No doubt you are right.” Ora made no attempt at conversion; it was encouraging that Ida had certain inclinations toward good taste, even if they were prompted by expediency.

“Jimminy, but your room’s pretty!” exclaimed Ida. “Mine’s pink—but lawsy!”

She gazed about the room, which, although she never had seen the sea, recalled descriptions of its shells washed by its foam. She knit her brows. “I guess it takes experience, and seein’ things,” she muttered. Her eyes travelled to the little bed in one corner. It would have looked like a nun’s, so narrow and inconspicuous was it, had it not been for its cover of pale pink satin under the same filmy lace.

“Sakes alive!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you sleep with your husband?”

Ora was angry to feel herself coloring. She answered haughtily, “We have separate rooms. It is the custom—I mean—I have always seen——”

“I’ve heard it was the stunt among swells, but I don’t hold to it. It’s only at night that you’ve really got a chance to know where a man is; and the more rope you give him the more he’ll take. What’s to prevent Mark slippin’ out when he thinks you’re asleep? Or coming home any old time? Besides, some men talk in their sleep. That gives you another hold. I’m always hoping Greg will, as he talks so little when he’s awake. You bet your life he never gets a room to himself.”

“Poor Mr. Compton!” thought Ora. “I fancy he’ll expiate.” “Shall we go downstairs?” she asked. “I got my portfolios out this morning.”

She tactfully had shown Ida her wardrobe first, and the guest descended to the library in high good humour. For an hour they hung over the contents of the Italian portfolios. Ida was enchanted with the castles and ruins, listened eagerly to the legends, and was proud of her own knowledge of the horrors enacted in the Coliseum. But over the photographs of the masterpieces in the Pitti and the Uffizi she frankly yawned.

“No more cross-eyed saints, and fat babies and shameless sporting women in mine,” she announced. “Them virgins sitting on thrones, holding four-year-olds trying to look like six months, make me tired.”

“Oh, well, I fancy you must see the old masters for the first time in their proper setting—and wonderful colouring——” Ora wondered if the masterpieces would appear somewhat overrated to herself if seen for the first time in Butte. It certainly was interesting to watch the effect of fixed standards—or superstitions—upon an untrained but remarkably sharp mind.

“That Last Supper looks like they’d been eating the paint,” pursued Ida.

Ora laughed. “I shan’t show you any more pictures today. This furniture is Italian—Florentine and Venetian. Let me tell you something about it.”

“I’d like to see all your rooms.” Ida rose and stretched herself luxuriously. Ora thought she looked like a beautiful Persian cat. “Houses interest me mor’n pictures, although I’ll buy them too some day. Not old masters, though. They’d give me the willys. This carved oak with faded gilt panels is a dream!” she exclaimed with instant appreciation. “I’d learn wood-carving if there was anyone in this God-forsaken camp to teach it.”

Ora clapped her hands, and once more, to Ida’s startled eyes she looked like a very young girl. “I studied several of the crafts when I was in Germany,” she cried, “wood-carving, brass-hammering, enamelling. I’ll set up a workshop—let me see, the attic would be the best place, and the furnace warms it—and teach you, and work myself. It’s just what I need. I wonder I never thought of it——”

“Need what?” interrupted Ida sharply.

“Oh, a relief from too much study. There’s nothing like a craft for mental workers—I should have thought of it before,” she repeated. “What do you say?”

“I’d like it first rate, and I guess you’ll find me quick enough with my hands, whatever you think of my cocoanut.”

“I think very highly of your cocoanut. This is my little drawing-room.”

Ida stood on the threshold for a few moments without comment. She had never cast a thought to her Puritan inheritance, but anger, disapproval, possessed her. She hated the room, but had no reason to give.

“You don’t like my favourite room?” asked Ora, who was watching her curiously.

“Is it your favourite room?” She turned this over. “No, I guess I like the heavy, solid, durable things best.” She struggled for her reasons. “You get your money’s worth in them. This looks like the first Chinook would blow it clear over into North Dakota, or as if you might come in some morning and find a heap of dust where it had been the night before—like a corpse when the air’s let in. I didn’t mind your bedroom being dainty and looking like some sea shells I saw once in a picture frame,—it looks all of a piece, too, you might say; but this—with them queer thin faded out chairs and sofas—the colours on the wood even, and them pictures over the doors and mantel look like they would do the final disappearing act while you wait—well, there’s something kinder mysterious—ghostly—it looks so stiff—and—at the same time—so kinder immoral——”

“I wonder if what you are groping for is the atmosphere of the past, which all old furniture must have, particularly if rearranged in something like its original setting.” Ora was regarding her with a new interest. “This furniture came out of a hôtel—what we would call a residence—with a history—several histories, I should think—and I fancy it was all frivolous, and wicked, and exciting——”

“I ain’t no spiritualist!” said Ida tartly. “Is that what you’re driving at?”

“I don’t know that I was thinking of occultism, even,” said Ora lightly. “But it is interesting to find these old things have atmosphere for you as well as for me——”

“Why is it your favourite room? Because it has ‘atmosphere’?”

“I don’t know. I doubt if I have ever given the matter a thought.”

“So this is your favourite room.” Ida turned her back on it. “H’m. Well, maybe I’ll understand some things better one of these days than I do now. Perhaps,” with one of her uncanny dashes of intuition, “I’ll understand it when I do you.”

“Let us go up to the attic and look it over. I’ll have the table and benches made tomorrow.” Something was moving toward expression in her own mind, but she flung it aside and ran up the stair followed by Ida, who dismissed the subject as promptly.

XII

THERE had been a good deal of haggling over the lease of the Oro Fino Primo mine, the engineers demanding a three years’ lease and bond, proposing to purchase it at the end of that period for fifty thousand dollars. Nor were they willing to pay more than ten per cent. in royalty, displaying the assay report on the ore and arguing that after the necessary outlay on development work, the ore body might be too small to repay them.

Mark, however, was determined not to close with them until he had visited the claim with Gregory Compton, and this proved to be impossible for several weeks. The engineers, unable to proceed, had dismissed their men. They threatened to withdraw their offer and look for another abandoned property. Mark told them to go ahead, and they remained in Butte.

In the course of a month Mark and Gregory were both free on a Sunday. They took a train for Pony, hired a rig and drove over to the Stratton claim, dignified by the name of mine.

The claim was on a small tableland between Gregory’s own hill, which terminated just beyond the borders of his ranch, and another slope covered with pines and firs. The engineers had put up a windlass, retimbered the shaft, sunk it twenty feet lower, and added a pile of dirty looking ore to the original half-obliterated heap about the collar of the shaft.

Gregory picked up half a dozen pieces of various sizes and examined them. “Their assay was about right, I should think,” he said. “Looks like good low grade ore, but not too good. It will do no harm to assay it myself, however,” and he dropped the sample into the pocket of his coat. Suddenly he gave a startled exclamation, and Mark saw his nostrils dilate, his nose almost point, as he darted forward and kicked aside a heap of loosely piled quartz. Then he knelt down and lifted out several lumps of greyish-black ore.

“What is it?” asked Mark curiously, and feeling something of the excitement of the hunter whose gun is trained on a bear. “D’you mean they’ve found copper glance?”

“At a depth of sixty feet? Not exactly. This is a basic igneous rock called pyroxenite, that may not be rich in gold but is more than likely to be—particularly as our friends have hidden it so carefully and said nothing about it. It may assay anywhere from ten dollars a ton to five hundred. I’m going down.”

The shaft was inclined, four by eight, and timbered with lagging. Gregory lit the candle he had brought and descended the ladder. He remained below about ten minutes; when he returned to the surface he was excited and triumphant.

“They’ve begun to drift on the vein,” he announced. “They’ve gone about three feet—it must have been then they learned the history of the claim. It’s pyroxenite all right, every inch of it.”

“Well, damn them!” said Mark.

“They can’t plead that they didn’t recognise the ore, uncommon as it is, because they began to drift the moment they struck the vein. It dips toward the ranch,” he added abruptly.

Mark whistled. “It’s pretty close. That would be a kettle of fish—if it apexed on your land! Lawsuit. Friendship of a lifetime broken. The beautiful Mrs. Mark Blake brings suit against the now famous Gregory Compton——”

“Oh, nonsense!” said Gregory shortly. But he was disturbed nevertheless.

“But there’s no nonsense in the idea that your own ore bodies may be just over the border. Why don’t you sink a shaft, just for nuts.”

Gregory, who was still excited, felt an impulse to confide his discovery to his friend. But his natural secretiveness overcame him and he turned abruptly away. “When I have finished at the School,” he said, “no doubt I’ll begin gophering again, but not before. What are you going to do about this? Let them have it?”

“I’ll let them have a piece of my mind first. What do you advise?—that I work the mine, myself? I could easily form a company if the ore is as rich as you think.”

“I wouldn’t take the chances. Lease the claim to them for a year. They’ll take it for that time with all this ore in sight. If they’ve hit a large chamber they’ll soon be netting several thousand dollars a day. If it’s only a pocket, let them find it out. At the end of a year you’ll know a good deal more about the mine than you do now. But keep an eye on them so that they don’t gouge, and make them pay you twenty per cent. royalty.”

“They’ll pay it through the nose,” said Mark emphatically.

Gregory laughed. “You feel as virtuously indignant as if you had never tried to do anybody yourself. It’s do or be done out West as well as back East, and precious few mines have a clean history. Marcus Daly never would have got the best part of Butte Hill if he hadn’t kept his mouth shut.”

“It isn’t that I’m so virtuous,” said Mark ingenuously, “but I don’t like the idea that anybody so nearly got the best of me. And just look at the way they covered it up.”

Gregory had kicked aside the greater part of a pile of grey ore, and revealed quite a hillock of the pyroxenite. He put several pieces in his pocket, discarding the first specimens. “I’ll get to work on this tonight,” he said, “and let you know first thing in the morning. But I’m willing to wager that it runs from sixty to a hundred dollars a ton.”

“And not a fleck of gold to be seen!” Mark, who, like all intelligent men of mining localities, had some knowledge of ores, examined the dark rock attentively. “They’re some geologists,” he added with unwilling admiration. “This would fool any ordinary mining engineer. Say!” he cried, “I’ll not tell Ora until she’s ready to leave—she’s figuring on going to Europe in the fall. It will be the surprise of her life, for I led her to think she’d get only a hundred or so a month. Don’t say a word about it to Ida.”

Gregory turned away to hide a curl of his lip. “I suppose we’d better go over and see Oakley, as we’re so close,” he said. “He’ll probably talk for an hour on his hobby, but any knowledge comes in useful to a lawyer.”

“What’s he done.”

“He figured out that Iowa and the Dakotas and Kansas were likely to have a drought next year, so he will sow about five hundred acres with flax in May. He has already put in about three hundred acres of winter wheat. The bottoms are reserved for alfalfa. He raises the capital and gets half profits. If it turns out as he expects he’ll have something at the end of a year to live on besides enthusiasm for intensive farming.”

They were driving toward Pony two hours later when Gregory said abruptly, “I’m glad that your wife and mine have taken to each other. It is a great thing for Ida. The improvement is wonderful.” He forebore to add, even to the man who had known his wife since childhood, “I don’t see what Mrs. Blake gets out it,” but possibly the irrepressible thought flew into Mark’s mind, for he replied promptly:

“It’s great for Ora. She’s tired of everybody else here; tired of so much reading too. I’ve seen that for some time, though I haven’t let on. A new interest was just what she wanted. Every clever woman has a touch of the school ma’am in her, and no one can deny that Ida’s refreshing. To Ora she’s almost a novelty. I think she rather hates to make her over, but she’s working on her as hard as I work on a case. Ora’s the thorough sort. What she does is done with all her might and main. Otherwise she don’t do it at all. She’s equally accomplished at that!”

He decided that this was the propitious moment; Gregory was in an uncommonly melting mood, for him. “Say!” he continued, “Ora and I have put up a little job on you. I’ve told her to take her new money and go to Europe for six months or so—By James, she shall go, even if this thing hangs fire and I have to sell some stock. It’s over six years since she’s seen Europe, and I guess she pines for it all right. Well, she wants to take Ida.”

Gregory demanded with unexpected promptness, “How much would it cost?”

“Oh, about a hundred to New York and a hundred and fifty over,” said Mark vaguely. “Of course when two are together it costs less. And in Europe distances are short. Ora says she shall go to pensions instead of hotels, if only because they would be two young women alone; and they cost much less. They can also travel second-class, and third in Germany and Switzerland. Ora says she and her friends always did it in summer because it was cooler and more interesting. She’s sent for a lot of Baedekers, is going to make a close estimate, then double it.”

“One of my aunts died the other day and left me a thousand dollars; she had no family. Ida can have it. Of course I could send her more if she needed it, but she’s clever with money.”

“That will do it.” (He knew that if it did not Ora, who would pay the bills, would manage to hoodwink Ida.) “And you must live with me. It’ll be fine. Bachelor’s Hall. We’ll do as we damn please.”

Gregory shook hands with him, his strong hard face illuminated with the infrequent smile that gave it something of a sweet woman’s charm. “Thanks, old man,” he said fervently. “Sounds good!”

XIII

SEVERAL weeks passed before Ora sent for Miss Ruby Miller. She was busier during those weeks than she had been for many months. Ida came every other day at one o’clock and remained until five. They carved wood in the attic, and looked at pictures or read in the library during the hour and a half that included tea. Ida confessed that during the latter interval she was so bored sometimes she could scream, but added that she would stick it out if she yawned every tooth in her head loose. One thing that never bored her was the picture of Ora—her working blouse changed for a dainty house gown—presiding at the tea-table. She studied every detail, every gesture; she even cultivated a taste for tea, which heretofore she had regarded as fit for invalids only, like jellies and cup-custard.

Ora’s alternate days and many of her evenings were filled with social duties. Butte was indulging in one of its hurricanes of festivity. Mrs. O’Hagan, who lived in the largest and finest house on the West Side, gave a series of dinner dances. Mrs. Burke, who owned the big ugly red house of appalling architecture built by Judge Stratton in the eighties, gave several entertainments in honour of two young visitors from Denver. Mrs. Maginnis, who lived in another palatial residence far west and far from the old Stratton house—which in its day had expressed the extreme limit of the city, as of fashion—gave a ball as brilliant as anything Ora had seen in a distant hemisphere. Flowers may be scarce in Butte, but flowers and palms may be imported by the carload from Helena, and the large rooms looked like an oasis in the grey desert of Butte. Every woman wore a ball gown made by some one of the great reiterative masters, and there were no wall flowers; for, although the tango had not yet set the whole world dancing, the women of Montana never had interpreted grey hairs as a signal to retire.

It was on the day after this ball that Ora had telephoned to Miss Miller. “Can you give me an hour or two tomorrow?” she asked.

“Sure. Can I come early? I’ve got fourteen heads to dress for the Cameron ball, and most of them want a facial too?”

“A what?”

“Face massage, and touchin’ up generally.”

“Oh.”

“It’s fine. Makes you feel as good as you look. What did you want me to do?”

“Ob, shampoo my hair. I want to consult you about it, too—and manicure.”

“Well, I’ll bring the creams along, and if you want a massage I’ll be ready.”

Ora had succeeded in making Miss Miller propose what she had quite made up her mind to try, and she rang off with a smile. The evening before she had thought herself the plainest woman at the party, and the effect of this discouraging conclusion had been to kill her animation and sag her shoulders until she knew she must look as dowdy as she felt. For the first time she realised how a blighted vanity may demoralise the proudest intellect. It was time to get a move on, as her new but rapidly developing friend would put it.

Ora was very proud of her work. She gave Professor Whalen due credit, and knew that Ida toiled at her exercises, but doubted if the uninspiring pedant would have been retained had it not been for the sense of emulation, slightly tinctured by jealousy, she managed to rouse in her new boon companion when they were together. But Ida was now exercising something of her latent force of character, determined to make the most of advantages for which she knew many a sudden-rich woman would “give her eye teeth.” She would polish up “good and plenty” before her husband made his strike; and waste no precious time on the inside of her skull when she had the cash to spend on its outside.

After the first week she dropped no more g’s, her grammar rapidly improved, and although she never would be a stylist, nor altogether forswear slang, not only because the ready-made phrase appealed to her unliterary mind, but because its use was ingrained, she reserved it more and more for those that best could appreciate it. As it annoyed Professor Whalen excessively, she went afield for new phrases “for the fun of seeing him wriggle.”

On the other hand, whenever she felt in the mood, she gazed at him with penitent languid eyes, promised never to use slang again, and amused herself racking other nerves. She knew just how far to go and “turned him off,” or “switched him back on to the track” before any real harm was done. Some day she might let him make a scene just for the fun of the thing, but not until she was “good and ready.”

Her feeling for Ora was more difficult to define. Sometimes she almost loved her, not only inspired by gratitude, but because Ora’s personal magnetism was intensified by every charm of refinement, vivacity, mental development, as well as by a broad outlook on life and a sweetness of manner which never infuriated her by becoming consciously gracious. At other times she hated her, for she knew that no such combination ever could be hers. Ora was a patrician born of patricians. She might go to the devil, preside over one of the resorts down on The Flat, take to drink and every evil way, and still would she be patrician. Herself might step into millions and carry her unsullied virtue to her grave and she never would be the “real thing.” For the first time she understood that being “a lady” had little to do with morals or behaviour. Nothing irritates the complacent American more than the sudden appreciation of this fact.

“But I guess I’ll be as good as some others,” Ida consoled herself. “After all, I don’t see so many Ora Blakes lying round loose. People don’t bother much these days if your clothes make their mouth water and your grammar don’t queer you.”

Gregory, when he had time to think about it—he read even at the breakfast and dinner-table, and had an assay plant in the cellar—was charmed with her improvement, and told her abruptly one day that if she kept faithfully to her tasks until November he would give her the thousand dollars he had received under the will of his aunt. “And you can do what you like with it,” he added. “I shan’t ask you. That’s the way I enjoyed money when I was a kid, and I guess women are much the same.”

“A thousand dollars!” Ida was rigid, her mouth open. “Geewhil—I beg pardon—My! But you are good!” She paused to rearrange her thoughts, which were in danger of flying off into language her husband was paying to remodel. “Can I really do anything with it I like?”

“You can.” He smiled at her bright wide-open eyes and flaming cheeks.

“I ain’t—haven’t said anything about it as I didn’t think it would be any sort of use, but Ora is going to Europe in the fall, and she told me Mark was going to try to persuade you to let me go with her. Now I can go on my thousand dollars, if you don’t mind. Mark wants you to stay with him.”

“He spoke to me about it—I had forgotten. There couldn’t be a better arrangement. This is the time for you to go to Europe—while your mind is still plastic.”

“You don’t seem to mind my going a little bit.” Rapture gave place to suspicion. Ida was not born with faith in man.

“My dear child! What good am I to you now? You might be keeping house for a deaf mute. All I need is the right kind of food and a comfortable bed. I’ll get both at Mark’s. Next year you would see even less of me than you do now. We get our last and most practical drilling in ore-dressing, metallurgy, power-utilisation, and geology. We shall be off half the time on geological expeditions, visits to mines in other parts of the state, smelters, the most up-to-date of the cyanide mills. So you see how much I shall be at home. Go to Europe and enjoy yourself.”

“All right. I’ll go. You bet. And I’ll not miss a trick. There’ll never be a thousand dollars better spent.”

XIV

“NOW I’ve got you where I want you, and I’m goin’ to talk—goin’ to say something I’ve been dyin’ to say for two or three years.”

Ora’s head was in the wash-basin. Miss Miller was leisurely spraying out the lime juice with which she had drenched her hair. Ora gasped, then gurgled something unintelligible, which Miss Ruby interpreted as encouragement to proceed. Mrs. Blake’s manner ever since the hairdresser’s arrival had been uncommonly winning, with something half-appealing, half-confiding that flew straight not only to that experienced young woman’s sympathies but to her professional instinct.

“It’s this,” she continued. “You need a thorough overhauling. In these days, particularly in this altitude, women take care of themselves as they go along, but you don’t. You’ve lost your complexion ridin’ and walkin’ for hours without a veil, sometimes without a hat, and you with a delicate skin like a baby’s and not even using creams. I heard a man say only last Sunday—I was givin’ his wife a facial and he was sittin’ round—that it was an awful pity you had gone off so, as you were the prettiest thing he ever laid eyes on when you came back after your pa’s death, and if Mark—Mr. Blake—hadn’t snapped you up before any other young man got a look at you you’d have had a dozen chances, for all you’ve got such a reputation for brains. ‘A man can stand brains in a white lily of a girl,’ says he, ‘but when she gets older she’s either got to keep her complexion or cut out the brains, and Ora Blake’s done neither’—Say if you squirm like that you’ll get your mouth and eyes full of lemon. His wife said she didn’t believe men cared for them thin white women anyway—she’s bustin’ with health herself—and he gave a grunt that means a lot to a girl who knows men like I do. You never did make anything of yourself and you’ve let yourself go these last two or three years something shameful. If you’d take yourself in hand, get on to yourself once for all, you’d have people twistin’ their necks off to look at you and callin’ you a Mariposa lily, or a Princess Pine, or a White Gladiolus and other poetry names like that. And you could get the reputation of a beauty all right. It makes me sick.”

“Could you make me into a beauty?” Ora’s voice was remarkably languid considering the flaming hue of her face, which, however, may have been due to its prolonged sojourn in the wash-basin. Miss Miller had wrung her hair out and was rubbing it vigorously.

“Couldn’t I just?”

As Mrs. Blake maintained a dignified silence, Miss Ruby proceeded to develop her theme. “Now, your hair, for instance. That’s the reason I used lemon today. You’ve been usin’ soap, and, what with this dry climate, and no care, it’s as harsh and broken as if you’d been usin’ soda on it every day. It’s lemon and hot water for you, first, last and always, and eggs after a journey. It needs a couple of months of hand-massage every other day right now; after that it will be up to you. Brush it night and morning and use a tonic twice a year.”

She paused and Ora waited with eyes closed to conceal her impatience. Finally she opened them irresistibly and met Miss Ruby’s in the mirror. They, too, looked embarrassed. Ora’s smile was spontaneous and sweet and not too frequent. It seldom failed to melt reserve and inspire confidence. She played this card without delay.

“Why don’t you go on?” she asked. “All that is most interesting and valuable. I shall remember every word of it.”

“Well—I was afraid that what I want to say most might sound as if I was drummin’ up trade, and the Lord knows I’ve got more to do than I could manage if there was ten days in every week. I turned down two ladies today to come here. I never shampoo the day of a ball.”

“My dear Miss Miller! You are an artist, and like all artists, you not only aim at perfection yourself but your eyes and fingers ache at imperfection. I suppose an author rewrites sentences as he reads them, and painters must long to repaint every picture they see. As for you—we are your page and canvas, and naturally we have the good fortune to interest you.”

“That’s it!” cried Miss Ruby, glowing. “That’s the size of it, only I couldn’t ever say it like that. Well, now, if you want this skin to look like a complexion and not like a hide, I’ve got to give you a massage every third day for quite a while. It not only needs creams and cold applications—hot only once in a while—but an awful lot of hand massage. It’s all run down and needs stimulating the worst way. Another year and you’d be havin’ lines. You can’t leave yourself to nature up here. She’s in too great a hurry to take back what she gave. And you must cut out hot breads and trash and wear a veil when you go out in the sun and wind. And you go to Boulder Springs once a week and take a vapour bath.”

“But I’ll always look washed-out.”

“Not if you look fresh, and wear colours that suit you.”

“And I never was called a beauty. That man, whoever he was, merely remembered the usual prettiness of youth. Every young girl is pretty unless she is ugly.”

“Well, I guess you didn’t take enough pains to make people think you were a beauty. Some—Ida Compton, for instance—don’t need to do anything but just show themselves. Any fool—particularly a man—can see black hair and red and white skin, and meltin’ eyes, and lashes a yard long, and a dashin’ figure. But odd and refined types like you—well, you’ve got to help it out.”

“How very interesting! Do you mean I must go about telling people that I am really beautiful, if they will only look at me long enough? Or—possibly—do you mean that I should make up?”

“I don’t mean either, ’though in a way I mean both. In the first place you’ve got to make the most of your points. You’re not a red blonde or a gold blonde, but what the French call sendray; in plain English, you’ve got ash-coloured hair. Now, that makes the blondest kind of blonde, but at the same time it’s not so common, and nature has to give it to you. Art can’t. What you want to do is to let people see that your colouring is so rare that you can’t get enough of it yourself, and by and by people will think they can’t either. You’ve been wearin’ all this hair twisted into a hard knot down on your neck. That don’t show off the hair and don’t suit your face, which is kinder square. I’m goin’ to pull it soft about your face and ears and then coil it softly on top of your head. That’ll give length to your face, and look as if you was proud of your hair—which you will be in a month or two. You mustn’t pay too much attention to the style of the moment. You’re the sort to have a style of your own and stick to it.”

“I’m in your hands,” murmured Ora. “What next?”

“Did you really lose interest in yourself?” asked Miss Miller curiously, and with the fine freedom of the West from class restraint. “Or didn’t you ever have any?”

“A little of both. When I was a girl I was a frightful pedant—and—Oh, well—Butte is not Europe, and I took refuge more than ever in books, particularly as I could have nothing of the other arts. You know the resources of Butte!”

“I’m glad you’re goin’ to Europe again, where I guess all kinds of variety are on tap.—Say, perhaps you’ll find out all the new kinks for the complexion in Paris, and tell me when you come back.”

“I will indeed!”

“I don’t hold to rippin’ the skin off, or hoistin’ it up,” said Miss Miller firmly. “All any skin needs is steady treatment, and constant care—constant, mind you, and never forget it. Now there’s your profile. It’s grand. The way I’m goin’ to fix your hair’ll show it off, and don’t you let it get scooped round the eyes, like so many women do. Massage’ll prevent that. I wish your eyebrows and lashes was black, like so many heroines in novels has. The contrast would be fine. But brown’ll do, and I guess the natural is your lay. Luckily them black grey eyes is a high note, and when you get your lips real red, you’ll have all the colour your style can carry. The gleamin’ white skin’ll do the rest.”

“How am I to get red lips, and what’s to make my skin gleam?”

“You’re anæmic. You go to a doctor and get a tonic right off. When I get through with your complexion it’ll gleam all right. No powder for you. It improves most women, but you want high lights. I don’t mean shine when I say gleam, either. I mean that you’ve got the kind of skin that when the tan’s off and it’s toned up and is in perfect condition (you’ve got to be that inside, too), sheds a sort of white light. It’s the rarest kind, and I guess it does the most damage.”

“And what good is all this beautifying to do me? And why make me dangerous? Surely you are not counselling that I begin a predatory raid on other women’s husbands, or even on the ‘brownies’?”

“Well, I guess not. I don’t approve of married women lettin’ men make love to them, but I do believe in a woman makin’ the most of herself and gettin’ all the admiration that’s comin’ to her. If you can be a beauty, for the Lord Almighty’s sake be one. Believe me, it’ll make life seem as if it had a lot more to it.”

“I shouldn’t wonder!”

“And you go in right off for deep breathin’ and Swedish exercises night and mornin’. It’s the style to be thin, but you want to develop yourself more. And they keep you limber—don’t forget that. When a woman stiffens up she’s done for. Might as well get fat round her waist. Now shut your eyes, I’m goin’ to massage.”

XV

“I WONDER!” thought Ora, “I wonder!”

It was some four months after her first séance with Miss Ruby Miller. There was no question of the improvement in her looks, owing, perhaps, as much to a new self-confidence as to the becoming arrangement of her hair and the improved tint and texture of her skin. The tonic and a less reckless diet had also done their work; her eyes were even brighter, her lips pink. Moreover, it was patent that the sudden reformation was as obvious to Butte as to herself. Women confessed to a previous fear that the “altitude had got on her nerves or something”; as for the men, they may or may not have observed the more direct results of Miss Miller’s manipulations, but it was not open to doubt that her new interest in herself had revived her magnetism and possibly doubled it.

Ora turned from the mirror in her bedroom, where she had been regarding her convalescing beauty with a puzzled frown, and stared down at the rough red dirt of her half-finished street—she lived far to the west. Her eyes travelled up to the rough elevation upon which stood the School of Mines in its lonely splendour, then down to the rough and dreary Flat. It stretched far to the south, a hideous expanse, with its dusty cemetery, its uninviting but not neglected road houses, its wide section given over to humble dwellings, with here and there a house of more pretensions, but little more beauty. It was in one of these last, no doubt, that her father had kept his mistress, whose children, she was vaguely aware, attended the public schools under his name. These houses, large and small, were crowded together as if pathetically conscious that the human element must be their all, in that sandy, treeless, greenless waste.

There was something pathetic, altogether, thought Ora, in the bright eagerness with which even the wealthy class made the most of their little all. They were so proud of Columbia Gardens, a happy-go-lucky jumble of architectures and a few young trees, a fine conservatory and obese pansies on green checkers of lawn; they patronised its Casino so conscientiously on Friday nights when the weather would permit. During the winter, they skated on their shingled puddle down on The Flat as merrily and thankfully as though it were the West End of London or one of the beautiful lakes in one of the beautiful German “gartens.” They motored about the hideous environs, and hung out of the car to emphasise their rapture at the lonely tree or patch of timid verdure; they entertained royally in their little Club House, out in another desolate waste, or played golf without envy or malice. In short they resolutely made the most of Butte when they were in it; they patted Butte and themselves on the back daily; they loved it and they were loyal to it and they got out of it as often as they possibly could.

“And I!” thought Ora, with a sense of panic. “I, who will probably get away every five years or so—what am I waking up for—to what end? I wonder!”

She walked slowly downstairs and, avoiding the little French drawing-room, went into the library and sat down among her books. Sash curtains of a pale canary colour shut out the rough vacant lots and ugly dwellings above her home, and cast a mellow glow over the brown walls and rows of calf-bound books. Judge Stratton had read in four modern languages and two dead ones. The love of reading, of long evenings alone in his deserted “mansion,” had been as striking a characteristic of his many-sided ego as his contempt for moral standards. Ora, who had grown into a slow but fairly thorough knowledge of her father’s life and character, permitted her thoughts to flow freely this afternoon and to speculate upon what her life might have been had Judge Stratton been as upright as he was intellectually gifted; if her mother had possessed the brains or charm to keep him ensnared; if she herself had been left, an orphan at twenty, with the fortune she inevitably would have inherited had her father behaved himself—instead of finding herself penniless, ignorant of all practical knowledge, a querulous invalid on her hands, her only suitor the “hustling” son of her mother’s old seamstress.

Ora admitted no disloyalty to Mark as she put these questions for the first time squarely to herself. She intended to continue to treat him with unswerving friendship, to give him all the assistance in her power, as long as she lived. And, as husbands went, she made no doubt that he was one to thank her grudging providence for. But that she would have considered him for a moment had she inherited the fortune her father had made and dissipated was as likely as that she would have elected to live her life in Butte.

She knew Mark’s ambitions. Washington was his goal, and he was by no means averse from being governor of his state meanwhile. Nor would he have been a genuine American boy, born in the traditional log cabin—it had been a log cabin as a matter of fact—if he had not cherished secret designs on the White House. In all this, did it prove to be more or less, she could be of incalculable assistance to him. And she was the more determined to render this assistance because she had accepted his bounty and was unable to love him.

She concluded with some cynicism that the account would be squared, being by no means blind to what she had done for him already in the way of social position and prestige; still, it was not only his right, but a penance demanded by her self-respect. She was living the most unidealistic life possible to a woman of her pride and temperament, but she would redeem it as far as lay in her power.

She moved impatiently, her brows puzzled again, and something like fear in her heart. What did this slow awakening portend? Why had she instinctively held it back with all her strength, quite successfully until her new-born vanity, with its infinite suggestions, had quickened it suddenly into imperious expression?

Certainly she was conscious of no desire for a more idealistic union with another man. If she had inherited a fortune, she would have married no one; not then, at all events; nothing had been further from her desire. She would have lived in Europe and travelled in many lands. Beyond a doubt her hunger for the knowledge that lies in books would have been satiated long since, never would have assumed a discrepant importance. She would be uniformly developed, and she would have met many men. With the double passport of birth and wealth, added to the fine manner she owed to her Southern mother, her natural vivacity and magnetism, and a physical endowment that she now knew could have been trained into positive beauty, she would have had her pick of men. And when a woman may choose of the best, with ample time at her disposal, it was incredible that the true mate, the essential companion, should not be found before it was too late. Most marriages are makeshifts; but for the fortunate few, with the intelligence to wait, and the developed instinct to respond, there was always the possibility of the perfect union.

Ora made a wry face at this last collocation. She had no yearning for the “perfect union.” Matrimony had been too unutterably distasteful. She turned hastily from the subject and recalled her father’s impassioned desire that she should make the West her home, her career, marry a Western man, give him and her state the benefit of her endowments and accomplishments. Possibly, surfeited with Europe, she would have returned to Montana to identify herself with its progress, whether she married or not. She was artistic by temperament and training, and correspondingly fastidious; she cordially detested all careers pursued by women outside those that were the natural evolution of an artistic gift. But she could have built herself an immense and splendid house, filled it with the most exquisite treasures American money could coax from the needy aristocracy of Europe, and have a famous salon; invite the pick of the artistic, literary, musical, and political world to visit her for weeks or months at a time, house parties of a hundred or more, and so make her state famous for something besides metals, intensive farming, and political corruption. No one could deny that the state would benefit exceedingly.

Conceivably, in time she would take a husband, assuredly one of high ambitions and abilities, one whose fortunes probably would take him to Washington.

This brought her back to Mark, and she laughed aloud. She had been romancing wildly; of late she had grudgingly admitted that nature may have composed her to be romantic after she had recovered from the intellectual obsession; and the circle had brought her round to her husband! He was “forging ahead” with extraordinary rapidity. She made no doubt that he would be a millionaire within the ten years’ limit he had set himself. Nor would he rely alone upon his legal equipment and the many opportunities to exercise it when a man was “on the job all the time”; he watched the development of Montana’s every industry, new and established. He “bought in on the ground floor,” gambled discreetly in copper, owned shares in several new and promising mines, and property on the most picturesquely situated of the new lakes constructed for power supply. He invested what he could afford, and with the precision of the man on the spot. Yes, he would be one of the Western millionaires, even if not one of the inordinate ones, and before his ten years had passed, if no untoward event occurred.

And it was on the cards that she would have her own fortune before long. She knew that Mark (who had her power of attorney) had made better terms with the engineers than he had anticipated, and he dropped mysterious hints which, knowing his level head, made her indulge in ornate dreams now and again. But he only smiled teasingly when she demanded a full explanation, and told her that she would realise how good or how bad her mine was when she went to the bank to sign her letter of credit.

For one thing she felt suddenly grateful. She knew that the mine had been leased for a year only and without bond. If, during that time it “panned out,” she would stipulate to mine it herself when the contract expired.

She sat up very straight and smiled. That was what she would have liked! If her father had but willed her this mine and capital enough to work it alone! Her fingers fluttered as they always did when handling ore; she had wondered before if the prospector’s fever were in her blood. How she should have enjoyed watching the rock come up in the buckets as the shaft sank foot by foot, until they struck the vein; always expecting chambers of incredible richness, gold, copper, silver. She would even learn to do the pleasant part of her own assaying; and she suddenly experienced an intense secretive jealous love for this mine that was hers and in which might be hidden shining blocks of those mysterious primary deposits deep in the sulphide zone; forced up through the veins of earth, but born how or where man could only guess. It was a mystery that she wanted to feel close to and alone with, far in the winding depths of her mine.

She got up and moved about impatiently. Her propensity to dream extravagantly was beginning to alarm her, and she wished uneasily that she could discover the gift to write and work it off. Where would it lead her? But she would not admit for a moment that her released imagination, pulsing with vitality, and working on whatever she fed it, only awaited the inevitable moment when it could concentrate on the one object for which the imagination of woman was created.

The pendulum swung back and more evenly. She told herself it was both possible and probable that she had a good property, however short it might fall of Butte Hill. She renewed her determination to mine it herself, and work, work, work. Therein lay safety. The future seemed suddenly full of alarms.

And there was Mark, his career, his demands, dictated not so insistently by him as by herself.

Ora’s soul rose in a sudden and desperate revolt beside which her rising aversion from unmitigated intellect was a mere megrim. She felt herself to be her father’s daughter in all her newly-opened aching brain-cells. He had lived his life to please himself, and if his temptations and weaknesses might never be hers—how could she tell?—his intense vitality survived in her veins, his imperious spirit, his scornful independence. She glanced at the rows of calf-bound books he had handled so often. Something of his sinister powerful personality seemed to steal forth and encompass her, sweep through the quickened corridors of her brain. Mark Blake was not the man he would have chosen for his daughter. Western, Mark might be to the core, but he was second-rate, and second-rate he would remain no matter what his successes.

And, she wondered, what would this proud ambitious parent, whose deepest feeling had been for his one legitimate child, say to her plan to play second fiddle for life to a man of the Mark Blake calibre? He had wanted her to marry in the West, but he had been equally insistent that she should develop a personality and position of her own. No devoted suffragist could have been a more ardent advocate of woman’s personal development than Judge Stratton had been where his daughter was concerned. To the rights of other women he had never cast a thought.

This was the hour of grim self-avowal. She admitted what had long moved in the back of her mind, striving toward expression, that she hated herself for having married any man for the miserable reason that has driven so many lazy inefficient women into loveless marriages. She should have gone to work. More than one of her father’s old friends would have given her a secretaryship. She could have lived on her little capital and taken the four years’ course at the School of Mines, equipping herself for a congenial career. If that had not occurred to her she could have taught French, Italian, German, dancing, literature. In a new state like Montana, with many women raised abruptly from the nethermost to the highest stratum, there was always a longing, generally unfulfilled, for the quick veneer; and women of older fortunes welcomed opportunities to improve themselves. She could have taken parties to Europe.

She had played the coward’s part and not only done a black injustice to herself but to Mark Blake. He was naturally an affectionate creature, and, married to a comfortable sweet little wife, he would have been domestic and quite happy. In spite of his enjoyment of his club, his cards and billiards, and his buoyant nature, she suspected that he was wistful at heart. He was intensely proud of his wife, in certain ways dependent upon her, but she knew he had taken for granted that her girlish coldness would melt in time and womanly fires kindle. Well, they never would for him, poor Mark. And possessing an inherent sense of justice, she felt just then more sympathy for him than for herself, and placed all his good points to his credit.

She was conscious of no sympathy for herself, only of that deep sense of puzzlement, disturbance, apprehension. Revolt passed. Indications—the abrupt bursting into flower of many unsuspected bulbs in her inner garden: softness, sympathy, a more spontaneous interest in and response to others, the tendency to dream, vague formless aspirations—had hinted, even before she took her new-born vanity to Miss Ruby Miller, that she was on the threshold of one of the dangerous ages (there are some ten or fifteen of them), and that unless she had the doubtful wisdom and resolution to burn out her garden as the poisonous fumes of roasting ores had blasted the fruitful soil of Butte, she must prepare to face Life, possibly its terrible joys and sorrows.

She sprang to her feet and ran upstairs and dressed for the street. At least she had one abiding interest and responsibility, Ida Compton. She was a self-imposed and absorbing duty, and always diverting.

XVI

“OH, you give me the willys!”

“My dear Mrs. Compton! How often have you promised me——”

“Well, if you will stare at me like a moonstruck setter dog when I’m trying to think up ’steen synonyms for one old word without looking in the dictionary! I can’t blow up my vocabulary like a paper bag and flirt with you at the same time.”

“I have no desire to flirt with you!” said Professor Whalen with great dignity. “It is quite the reverse. You have been playing with my feelings for months.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. I’ve been too set on becoming a real lady before leaving for Europe—haven’t thought about you.”

Professor Whalen turned a deep dull red. His overlapping upper teeth shot forward as if to snap down upon his long rather weak chin. He stared past Ida through the open window. It was May and the snow was melting on the mountains, had disappeared from the streets of Butte; there is a brief springtime in Montana between the snows of winter and the cold rains of June, and today was soft and caressing.

“I’ll tell you what is the matter with you,” said Ida, cruelly. “It’s the spring of the year.”

Whalen sprang to his feet. For the first time in his anæmic life he was furiously angry, and he rejoiced in the sensation. “I wish you were a man,” he stuttered. “I’d beat you. It would do my heart good.”

“If you were a real man you would enjoy beating a woman a long sight more,” goaded Ida, who watched him as a man-eating tigress may watch the squirming victim between her paws. She had fed her vanity and amused herself by playing on the little man’s pale emotions until she was convinced he really was in love with her. She suddenly made up her mind to force him to “let go,” and experience the sensation of being made love to feloniously.

“I am not a brute,” announced Whalen, still in the same stifled voice. His face was purple, but he was conscious of a warning whisper that he was in a fair way to lose this remunerative pupil. He dismissed the warning. There is probably no man so insignificant, in whom passion for the imperative woman does not develop abnormally the purely masculine conceit. He may despair in solitude, when devitalised by reaction and doubt, but when in her presence, under her inviting eye, and hurried to a crisis by hammering pulses and scorching blood, he is merely the primitive male with whom to desire is to have.

Ida laughed, a low throaty husky laugh. “If you were,” she said cuttingly, “you might stand a show.”

“It is you that are brutal,” hissed poor Whalen.

Ida leaned back in her chair and looked at him out of half-closed eyes. “What induced you to fall in love with me, anyhow?” she demanded in her sweet lazy voice. Whalen clenched his hands.

“I am a man if I am not a brute. You are the most fascinating woman on earth, and you have deliberately tried to entice me from the path of rectitude I have trod all my life——”

“What’s that?” Ida sat up straight, her brows drawn in an ominous frown.

“I have resisted you until today, but I yield——”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“I expected to be tormented to the utmost limit. But I have stood all of it that I purpose to stand.” His voice by this time was a subdued roar. “I don’t care whether you love me or not. I don’t think you could love anybody. I have read that sirens never do. But you are an enchantress, and you have shown plainly enough——”

Ida’s frown had relaxed, but her eyes blazed. He misunderstood their expression, as well as the sudden forward thrust of her head. He sprang forward, caught her by the shoulders and kissed her.

“Aw!” Ida’s voice was almost a roar. She leaped to her feet, twirled him about, caught him by the back of his collar and the seat of his trousers, and threw him out of the window as if he had been an offensive dog. She flung his hat and stick after him and slammed the window down. Then she stamped her feet in inarticulate rage, and rubbed and bit her mouth. It was one thing to play with a man’s passions and quite another to be defiled by them. Ida seethed with the fierce virtue of a young inexperienced and temperamentally cold woman. For a few moments she used very bad language indeed, and struggled with an impulse to ran after the “little puppy” and whip him in the street. But, remembering that she was making a heroic attempt to be a grande dame, she finally went into her bedroom and washed her face.

XVII

THERE was a knock on the front door. Ida, smoothing her hair, hastened to open it, glad of diversion. Ora stood there. For a moment the girls looked hard at each other, then burst into laughter.

“What’s up?” asked Ida. “You look——”

“My dear, it is I who should ask? Your face is crimson; you look as if you had just given someone a beating, and I met poor little Whalen, dusty, dishevelled, growling like a mad dog—he didn’t know me.”

“Well, I guess he won’t know himself for a while,” said Ida drily, leading the way into the parlour. “When he comes to he’ll have his work cut out to climb back to his little two-cent pedestal and fit on his battered halo.” She related the incident. “What do you know about that?” she demanded in conclusion. “Wouldn’t it come and get you?”

“I am afraid you have made an enemy. It is always best to let them down gently, save their pride—and—ah!—it isn’t customary to throw gentlemen out of the window!”

“Gentlemen!” snorted Ida. “He’s no gentleman. He not only kissed me with his horrid front teeth, but he insinuated that I was just languishing for him, the——” Once more Ida’s feelings overflowed in language not intended for print. “It made me so mad I’d have lammed him with the umbrella if we’d been in the hall.”

“Ida,” asked Ora abruptly, “would you have minded so much if he had been good-looking and attractive?”

“Well—perhaps—I guess in that case I’d simply have smacked him and let him get out quick by the front door. But I don’t want any man touching me. I’m a married woman.”

“But if you flirt and lead them on——”

“You said once yourself that American men understood the game and knew how to take their medicine.”

“I also said that they can fall more tiresomely in love than any other men. Of course the Whalens don’t count. But do you intend to go on making men fall in love with you and throwing them—metaphorically—out of the window?”

“Much chance I’ll get.”

“You’ll find plenty of chances in Europe. You are a remarkably beautiful woman. And Europeans take what we call flirting for shameless encouragement.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be getting experience of the world all right. And the Lord knows I’d like to be admired by men who have seen something. I can take care of myself, and Greg don’t need to worry.”

“I’ve no doubt of that. Of course you are awfully fond of Mr. Compton, aren’t you?” Ora spoke somewhat wistfully.

“Oh, yes; fond enough, fonder than a good many wives, I guess, for he’s kind and pleasant, and no earthly trouble about the house. But when a woman marries she gets a kid right there at the altar, and he’s her biggest kid till his false teeth drop out on his death-bed, and his great-grandchildren are feeding him through a tube. I don’t want any of the other sort of kids, and I guess I’m not what you call the maternal woman, but the Lord knows I’m a mother to Greg and a good one. I’d like to know what he’d do without me—that’s the only reason I hate leaving. He never thinks of changing his shoes when they’re wet, and half the time wouldn’t eat anything but his book if I didn’t put the stuff right in front of him.”

“Mark knows him almost as well as you do, and will look after him. My maid, who is practically my housekeeper, and an old family servant, will also keep a maternal eye on him.”

“He keeps himself tidy,” conceded Ida handsomely. “Wants clean things every day, but never knows where to find them. He’ll wander out into the kitchen where I’m cooking breakfast and ask where his socks are, and they always in the same drawer.”

“I fancy you’ve spoiled him.”

“Not I. I don’t hold with spoiling men. They’re born spoiled anyhow. I found Greg walking round in a dream when I married, and a pile of socks as high as the door knob he’d thrown away because they’d holes in them so tiny you could hardly see them. I darned every one, you bet, and he’s wearing them now, though he don’t know it. He’s like that, as dainty as a cat, and as helpless as a blind kitten. I am a wife and I know my duty,” concluded Ida virtuously.

“I certainly shall give Custer minute directions. I can’t have you worrying.”

“I’ll not worry, once I’m started. Don’t you fret! But what’s the matter with you, Ora? You look kinder excited, and kinder—well, harassed. How’s that out of the new pocket dictionary I’ve set up in my head?”

“I’ll soon have to look to my own vocabulary. Oh—I——”

“Something’s up. Spit it out. It’ll do you good.”

“Dear Ida! If you must use slang, do confine yourself to that which has passed through the mint of polite society. There is an abundance to choose from!”

“Don’t you worry; I won’t disgrace you. But I must let out a tuck occasionally when we’re alone. Greg wouldn’t let me go to any of the Club dances, and I scarcely ever see Ruby or Pearl, they’re so busy—to say nothing of myself!”

“Very well,” said Ora, laughing. “Let me be your safety valve, by all means.”

“Fire away.”

“Oh—how am I to tell you—I scarcely know, myself——”

“I guess you’re waking up. Ruby, who knows human nature like a book——”

Ora half rose. “Have you been talking me over with Miss Miller?” she asked haughtily.

“Not much. Hardly seen her since we met. But you interest Butte, you know. I guess they talk you over good and plenty. It was only a few days before you called that the Miller girls visited with me all day, and they talked a lot about you. Ruby said that if you’d come to out of the sleeping beauty stage, you’d make things hum, and that her fingers just itched to get at your skin and hair.”

“She said that to me once; and I don’t mind telling you that I called her in some time ago.”

“Oh, I’m not a bat. I’ve seen you looking prettier every day, and there’s only one way to do it, when you’ve let yourself go. I’ve had the benefit of Ruby’s advice for years, and I don’t propose to let myself go, not for a minute.”

“Right you are. And do live your life normally from day to day, developing normally. The awakening process, when the Nature that made you is no longer content to be a mere footstool for the mind, is almost as painful as coming to after drowning. I suddenly have become conscious of myself, as it were; I am interested in many more things—personal things—I seem to want far more of life than I did a few months ago——”

“In other words, you don’t know where you’re at.”

Ora laughed merrily. “My present condition could not be stated more patly!”

“Ora, I don’t want to pry into your confidence, and you’re not one to give much of that anyhow, but everybody in Butte knows that you’re not in love with Mark, and never were, nice as you treat him—only because you couldn’t be anything but a lady if you tried. Mrs. O’Neil, one day when she was having a massage, told Ruby all about your marriage. She said you were the most bewildered young thing she ever saw, and that Mark snapped you up before another young man could get a look at you. Now, I’ve known Mark all my life—he beaued my sister who died, for a year or two, and his mother’s cottage was just up the hill anyhow; and although he’s a good chap and a born hustler, and bound to get rich, he’s not the sort of man women fall in love with. You wouldn’t have fallen in love with him, if he’d been born a millionaire, and travelled and got Butte out of his system. And if your father had left you well off, you wouldn’t have looked at him. There’s men, bad and good—that’s to say, better—that women fall in love with, and there’s men bad and good that they don’t, not in a thousand years. Poor old Mark’s a Don’t all right. You ain’t angry at my saying all this, but Mark was like my own brother for years?”

“Oh, no, I am not angry. You are far too matter-of-fact. You might be discussing different grades of ore!”

“Well, that’s about it, and the poor ore can’t help itself, any more than the slag and gangue can, and Mark’s not either of those, you bet. He’s good metal, all right, only he didn’t come out of the Anaconda mine—What have you turned so red about? My! But you do blush easy!”

“It’s this—do you despise me—do you think I did wrong—Oh, I mean I have quite suddenly realised that I never should have married any man for so contemptible a reason. I should have gone to work——”

“Work? You?”

“Why not? Many a delicately nurtured woman has earned her bread.”

“The more fool she if she could get a man to earn it for her. That’s what they’re for. The Lord knows they pride themselves on the way they do it, being the stronger sex, and a lot more words. I guess I’d have married before Greg turned up if I’d met a man I was sure was going to make something of himself. You did just right to take a good husband and take him quick when you found yourself in a hole.”

“Yes—but——” Her blush deepened. “You see—” Ora never had had an intimate confidant. It was doubtful if she ever would have; not, at all events, a woman. But Ida, as she herself would have expressed it, could always see through a stone wall when there was a crack in it.

“Oh, shucks!” she said. “Don’t let that worry you. If you don’t feel that way first you do last, I guess. Most of us are bored to death, but women have stood it for a few thousand years, and I guess they can stand it for a few thousand more. We all of us have to pay high for anything we want. That’s about the size of it. Forget it.”

“Thanks, dear, you console me.” Ora smiled with closed eyes, but she was thrilled with a sudden inexplicable longing; like other of her recent sensations, it puzzled and alarmed her.

“Ora!” exclaimed Ida suddenly. “There’s one thing that’s just as sure as death and taxes; and knowing men and knowing life don’t help women one little bit. It’s this: A woman’s got to have her love affair sooner or later. If she marries for love she’s pretty safe, for ten or fifteen years, anyhow. But if she doesn’t, well, she’ll get it in the neck sooner or later—and it’ll be about the time she begins to sit up and take notice. She’s a regular magnet then, too. So watch out.”

Ora opened her eyes. They looked like steel. “I have never given a thought to love. There is nothing I want less. I shall continue to make Mark as good a wife as I know how to be——”

“Oh, I’m not saying you’ll go off the hooks, like some I could mention in your own bunch, but if the man comes along you’ll fall in love all right. Might as well try to stop a waterfall from jumping over the rocks. I’m not so dead sure I do know what you’d do. Pride, and high breeding, and duty would pull one way, but—well, I guess when you marble women get waked up good and plenty, what they call roused, you’re the worst kind. A considerable number of other things would pull from the opposite direction, and one of them would be the man.”

“Ida!” said Ora, aghast. “How do you know so much? Your opportunities have been very limited.”

“Oh, have they? Wasn’t I born and brought up in a mining camp? Butte is some education, believe me. I ran straight all right, not only because the sporting life had no charms for me but because I figured on moving over one of these days to Millionaire Gulch. But it wasn’t for want of opportunity, and the same opportunities were handed over by men of your crowd—or fixin’ to be. Besides, some women are born wise that way, I guess, and I’m one of ’em. You’ve been living in a sort of self-made heaven all your life, with only books for inhabitants. I could put you wise every day in the week.”

“It is true that although I saw a good deal of life while my mother lived so much in the world, and always have been deeply interested in the work of the psychological novelists, particularly the Europeans—I—well, I never applied it to my—never thought much about it until lately. I do not seem to know myself the least little bit.”

“I guess it’ll be me—Oh, Lord, I—taking you to Europe, not you me. I’ll see that you don’t get into mischief, for I’d hate like the dickens to have you go to pieces over any man. Not one of them that ever lived since Adam is worth it. They’re all right to marry, all things being equal, but to sacrifice your life for, nixie. Any style of man you are partial to? I’ll keep his sort off with a broom.”

“I’ve never gone so far as even to think——”

“Every woman has her style in men,” said Ida firmly. “I heard of a woman once who had three husbands and each one had a wart on his nose.”

“Oh, you are funny! I have heard that a woman falls in love with a type, not with the man, and, like all epigrams, that one contains a half-truth. I had two or three girlish fancies; one was an Austrian officer, another a French nobleman—and not impecunious—he wasn’t a fortune hunter. The third was a New Yorker who fell in love with my cousin and married her. I had a few heart spasms over him, in particular; possibly because he was quite out of reach. It is true that they were all more of or less of a type—tall and thin and dark, with something very keen and clever and modern in their lean—rather hard faces.”

“Hi!” cried Ida.

“What is the matter? You look at me as if you had seen a ghost.”

Ida threw back her head and laughed, showing her sharp little white teeth, and straining her throat until the firm flesh looked thin and drawn, over too strong muscles. “Oh, Lord! I was just thinking what a lot of trouble I’m in for, playing dragon to my lily-white lady. I guess about half the men in the world are brunettes, fat or lean. Say, are you going to the Prom? It’s only a month off.”

“I hadn’t thought about it. Probably. I have been asked to be a patroness, and Mark is sure to want to go. Have you decided what to wear?”

“Ma gave me a coral-red silk when I married, and I’m going to make it over and veil it with black net.”

“Splendid!” cried Ora warmly. “Bring it up to the house. Mrs. Finley is really an excellent seamstress. We’ll all take a hand. It will be great fun. And you will look stunning.”

“What will you wear?”

“I expect some gowns from my New York dressmaker in a few days. It will depend upon the state of my complexion, I fancy.”

XVIII

ORA received another budget of Ida’s philosophy on the day before the Prom; she had taken her a long string of pink coral she had found among her old possessions, and after Ida had wound it in her hair and round her neck, and finally tried on her gown, and then draped Ora successively in various scarves, remnants of her own wedding finery—being almost as interested in the new complexion as Ora herself—they had suddenly come to the conclusion that while in Europe they would assume the mental attitude of girls travelling without a chaperon. They would see the world from the independent girl’s point of view, flirt like girls, not like married women (which at least would save their consciences), force men to accept the phenomenon. For a time they discussed the superior advantages of being young widows, but, alluring and even thrilling as were the possibilities evoked, they dismissed the alternative on the ground that it might prove a bore always to be on the defensive; man making no secret of his attitude toward widows. Besides, they felt a delicacy about burying their indulgent husbands even in mental effigy. As counterfeit girls they could crowd enough excitement into six months to serve them in memory during long periods of Butte.

“It will be some bluff,” cried Ida. “And believe me, we’ll have the time of our lives. And no remorse in mine. I intend to flirt the limit, for I’m just ready to quit being a mother for a while and see a man’s eyes kindle when he comes nigh—see him playing about at the end of a string. I didn’t have near enough of it even when I had half Butte at my feet—excuse what sounds like conceit but is cold fact. Now, I’m going to light up every man I take a fancy to. I don’t care an abandoned prospect hole whether I hurt ’em or not. All they are good for is to give us a good time.”

“Ida!” Ora was aghast as she often had been before at these naked feminine revelations. “You talk like a man-eater. I hope to heaven I am not like that down deep.”

“Oh, maybe you won’t be so bad because you haven’t got as much vanity. Mine’s insatiable, I guess, and good old Mother Nature taught me the trick of covering it up with the don’t-care-a-damn air combined with the come-hither eye. That does the trick. And they get what hurt’s going. I don’t. You’ll cultivate men, thinking it’s your vanity waked up, or mere youth, or because it’s time to have a fling, but what you really are after is the one and only man. The Companion. The Sympathetic Soul. The Mate. All that rot. He don’t exist, kiddo. He’s the modern immaculate conception, and he’s generally stillborn; the bungling doctor being the plain unadulterated male inside of himself. You’ve got to be your own companion, and if you want happiness you can get it by expecting just nothing of men. Use them. Throw them on the ash heap. Pass on to the next. Quit sitting on the watch tower with your eyes trained on the horizon for the prince that is born and lives and dies in a woman’s imagination.”

“I have seen happy—united couples—who had been married for years.”

“Oh, yes; some couples are born to jog along together, and some wives are born man-tamers, and get a lot of satisfaction out of it. But you’re much too high-falutin’ for that. You’ll always dream of the impossible—not only in man but of what he’s got to give—which ain’t much. And I didn’t need all them—those—psychological and problem and worldly novels you made me read, translated from half a dozen languages, either. You take my advice, Ora, and don’t start off on any fool hunt for an ideal. Men are just matter-of-fact two-legged animals, and as selfish as a few thousand years of fool women have naturally made them. He does well while he’s courting because he’s naturally good at bluff. But every bit of romance oozes out of him after he’s eaten his first breakfast of ham and eggs at home. We can keep up the bluff forever. Men can’t. Each one of them’s got a kid twin brother inside that plays marbles till he dies and makes you feel older every day. No, sir! If I ever had any delusions, I’ve got over them good and plenty. And I thank the Lord,” she added piously.

“I think that rather adorable, you know: the eternal boy. And I fancy it is all that saves men from becoming horrors; in this country, at least—when you consider the unending struggle, and strain, and sordid business of money getting. They use up all their bluff in the battle of life, poor things. Why shouldn’t they be natural with us?...”

Ora was recalling this conversation as she sat in her bedroom on the following evening. Her elemental yet uncannily sophisticated friend had a way of crashing chords out of jealously hidden nerves, which no exercise of will could disconnect from the logical parts of the brain. If it were true that what her now rampant ego, too long starved, really demanded was man and romance, she wished she had let herself run to seed until it was too late to reclaim her lost beauty and adventure into temptation. But a glance into the mirror deprived her of any further desire to join the vast sisterhood of unattractive females. Moreover, she had faith in the dominance of her will and common sense, and if her beauty would help her to the mental contacts she craved with brilliant and interesting men, far be it from her to execrate it.

She dismissed the mood of self-analysis impatiently and opened her wardrobe, although half inclined not to attend the Prom. She was one of the patronesses, but her presence was not essential. It was pre-eminently the night of nights for young folks—brownies and squabs—and the absence of a married woman of twenty-six would pass unrecorded. Not a man in Butte interested her personally, nor was she in a frame of mind to be interested by any of the too specialised products of the West. Nor was she inordinately fond of dancing; there really was no object in going to this party save to witness the début and possible triumph of her protégée.

But she felt something more than indifference toward this party. It was as if a gong sounded a warning in the depths of her brain—in her subconsciousness, perhaps, where instinct, that child of ancestral experience, dwelt. But even while she hesitated she knew that she should go, and she took one of her new gowns from a long drawer, and then began to arrange her hair.

It was now some five months since Miss Ruby Miller had taken her in hand, and if the young woman’s bank account was heavier her pride as an artist far outweighed it. Ora’s hair was soft, abundant, the colour of warm ashes. The skin of her face was as white and transparent, as “pearly” to use its doctor’s own descriptive word, as the fine protected surface of her slender throat, her thin but by no means bony neck. Her lips were pink; they never would be red; and after one taste of “lip stick,” Ora had declined to have them improved by art. But they were a soft country-rose pink and suited her clear whiteness far better than scarlet. Her eyes, never so clear and startling as now, lighted up the cold whiteness of her face and made her pink mouth look childish and somewhat pathetic. If her lips had been red, her face would have had the sinister suggestion so many women achieve with the assistance of art; as it was she looked by no means harmless as she smiled at herself in the mirror and coiled her hair softly on the top of her head. After some experimenting she had decided that she could not improve upon an arrangement which for the present at least was all her own.

She rang for Custer to hook her gown. It was a very soft gown of white satin draped about the bust with lace and chiffon. It was cut to the waist line in the back and almost as low in front, for her figure was hardly more developed than a growing girl’s; and it was unrelieved by colour. She had already put on the string of pearls her mother had hidden when the other jewels were sold in Paris. Altogether it was a costume she would not have dared to wear even two months ago, when a touch of colour on the bodice or in her hair was necessary to divert attention from her spoiled complexion.

Custer had been her mother’s maid for many years and had returned with her to Butte. After an interval of employment elsewhere, she had come to Ora as soon as Mark had built his house. She hooked the gown, pinned up a stray lock with an invisible hairpin, shook out the little train, and stood off.

“It reminds me of the way your mother used to look,” she said, “and you’re even prettier than she was, Miss Ora—now. But I fancy you’ll be more comfortable in this gown when you wear it in London. These ladies dress smartly enough, but never as low as the English ladies do, leastways out here. I fancy it’s the Western men. They don’t seem to approve of showing too much.”

“Well, I think I’ll rather enjoy startling the natives. Quick—give me my wrap! I hear Mr. Blake coming. No controversy here.”

XIX

THE Prom was held not in the School of Mines but in The Coliseum, a large hall over a saloon and garage, half way between The Hill and The Flat, requisitioned by all classes when the weather forbade the use of Columbia Gardens. The walls were covered with the School colours, copper and green, flags, and college pennants. The ceiling was a network of electric lights with coloured globes, copper and green, fluttering paper and sprays of apple blossoms, brought from far! “Cozy corners” looked like fragments of a lower altitude, and the faithful palm was on duty everywhere. The orchestra, on a suspended balcony in the centre of the room, was invisible within the same elaborate scheme of decoration.

When Ora entered with her husband the Grand March had finished and the instruments were tuning for a waltz. She saw Ida standing directly under the orchestra surrounded by several men who patently were clamouring for dances. Even in that great room full of women dressed from New York and Paris, Ida looked distinctive and superb. Ora smiled proudly, as she observed her, quite oblivious that the throng of men and women and indignant “squabs,” who had been discussing the wife of Gregory Compton, had transferred their attention to the dazzling apparition in white. Ida wore her gown of coral silk, whose flimsiness was concealed under a mist of black shadow lace. The coral beads clasped her strong white throat and fell to her supple waist. There was a twist of coral tulle in her black hair, which was arranged in the rolling fashion of the moment, obeyed by every other woman in the room save Ora Blake. And her cheeks, her lips, were as coral as the fruit of the sea. She had powdered her face lightly to preserve its tone through exercise and heat. All the arrogance of youth and beauty and powerful magnetism was expressed in the high poise of her head; a faint smile of triumph curved above her little white teeth; her body was in perfect repose yet as alert as that of a healthy young cat. The waltz began and she glided off in the arm of a young mining engineer from the East. She danced precisely as the best-bred women in the room danced (early in the evening): ease without abandon, dignity without stiffness.

“Heavens, but the American woman is adaptable!” thought Ora. “I never realised before exactly what that time-worn platitude meant. Probably the standards in the Ida set are not so different from ours, after all. As for looks and carriage she might have three generations behind her. Is it democracy or the actress instinct of woman—permitted its full development in this country for the first time in her history?”

This was not entirely a monologue, but addressed for the most part to Professor Becke, one of the most distinguished instructors of the School of Mines, and one of the men she liked best in Butte. He was a tall fair man, with a keen thin fimbriated face, and long fine hands. Ora made a point of asking him to dine with her once or twice a month.

He led the way to two of the chairs on the side of the hall after she had announced that she did not intend to dance.

“But this is the first party we have had for weeks,” he said. “They won’t leave you to me for long.”

“I don’t feel in the mood for dancing. Besides,” she added with a new daring, “I’m all in white and looking very white once more; I don’t want to get warm and spoil the effect.”

He stared into her challenging eyes as if he saw her for the first time. In that room, full of colour and of vivid women and young girls, she produced an almost disconcerting effect with her statuesque beauty, her gleaming whiteness, her frail white body so daringly displayed in its white gown. And, oddly enough, to those staring at her, she made the other women look not only commonplace but cold.

Ora smiled to herself; she was quite aware of the impression at work, not only on the scientific brain, but on others more readily responsive; she had considered the prudence of practising on Butte before departing for wider fields.

The Professor changed colour, but replied steadily: “Fancy you two extraordinary creatures loose in Europe! You should take a bodyguard. I can understand Compton giving his consent, for he is the kind of man that wouldn’t remember whether his wife were twenty or forty at the end of his honeymoon, and there can be little between them in any case. But Blake!”

“Oh, we’ll come home without a scandal,” said Ora lightly. “Ida is the reverse of what she looks, and I—well, I am the proverbial ‘cold’ American woman—that the European anathematises. Ida, of course, looks the siren, and I shall have some trouble protecting her, until she learns how far she can go. But at least I am forewarned.”

“I fancy you will have more trouble protecting yourself!” Professor Becke’s voice was not as even as usual. His intellect was brilliant, and illuminating, and never more so than when in the society of this young woman whom heretofore he had admired merely as a vivacious and exceptional mind; but, startling as this revelation of subtle and alluring womanhood was, he remembered that he was no longer young and that he had an admirable wife with an eagle eye; he had no intention of scorching his fingers in the attempt to light a flame that would guide him to the rocks even were he invited to apply the torch. But he was a man and he sighed a little for his vanished youth. If he had been twenty years younger he fancied that he would have forgotten his good lady and risked burning his heart out. He moved his eyes away deliberately and they rested on Mark Blake, mopping his scarlet face after a lively waltz. He was a kindly man, but all that was deathlessly masculine in him grinned with a cynical satisfaction.

“Who is that?” asked Ora abruptly, and forgetting a faint sensation of pique.

“Ah! Who?”

She indicated a man leaning against one of the doorways, and looking over the crowd with unseeing eyes. “Heavens! What a jaw! Is he as ‘strong’ as he looks, or is he one of Bismarck’s wooden posts painted to look like a man of iron?—Why, it’s——”

“That is Gregory Compton, and he is no wooden post, believe me.”

“I haven’t seen him for years. Can any man be as strong as he looks?”

“Probably not. He hasn’t had time to discover his master weaknesses yet, so I don’t pretend to guess at them myself. At present he is too absorbed in squeezing our poor brains dry——”

“Doesn’t he ever smile?”

“So rarely that the boys, who have a nickname for all their fellow students, call him ‘Sunny Jim.’”

“What do you think of his wife?” asked Ora abruptly. She hardly knew why she asked the question, nor why she felt a secret glow at the expected answer.

The Professor turned his appraising eye upon the substantial vision in coral and black that tonight had been pronounced the handsomest woman in Butte. “There could be no finer example of the obvious. All her goods are in the front window. There are no surprises behind that superlative beauty; certainly no revelations.”

“I wonder! Ida is far cleverer than you think, and quite capable of affording your sex a good deal in the way of surprises, not to say shocks.”

“Not in the way I mean—not as you will do, worse luck for my helpless sex. There is no soul there, and, I fancy, little heart. She is the last woman Gregory Compton should have married.”

“Why?” Ora tried to look bored but polite.

“Oh—whatever she may have for other men she has nothing for him. She looks the concentrated essence of female—American female—egoism. Compton needs a woman who would give him companionship when he wanted it, and, at the same time, be willing in service.”

Ora bristled. “Service? How like a man. Are we still expected to serve men? I thought the world was moving on.”

Professor Becke, who, like most men married to a domestic commander-in-chief, was strenuously opposed to giving women any powers backed up by law, asked with cold reserve: “Are you a suffragette?”

Ora laughed. “Not yet. But I just escaped being born in the Twentieth Century. I belong to it at all events.”

“So you do, but you never have been in love——” He broke off in embarrassment; he had forgotten for the moment that this white virginal creature had been married for six years. She showed no resentment, for she barely had heard him; she was looking at Gregory Compton again, and concluding that he might appeal strongly to the supplementary female, but must antagonise women whose highly specialised intellects, at home only on the heights of civilisation, had submerged their primal inheritance.

Professor Becke went on:

“Even a clever woman’s best career is a man. If you women develop beyond nature that powerful old tyrant will simply snuff you out.”

“Well, man will go too. That may be our final triumph.”

“Atlantis over again! And quite in order that the race should perish through the excesses of woman. Then Nature, having wiped her slate clean with a whoop, will begin all over again and precisely where she did before. No doubt she will permit a few records to survive as a warning.”

“You may be right—but, although I have an idea I shall one day want to justify my existence by being of some use, it won’t be because my sex instinct has got the better of my intelligence. But I refuse to think of that until I have had a royal good time for a few years.”

“That is your right,” he said impulsively. “You are altogether exceptional—and you have had six years of Butte! I am glad your mine has panned out so splendidly. There is quite an excitement in the Sampling Works——”

“What?” Ora forgot Gregory Compton. “I knew the mine was doing well——”

“Surely you know that your profits in royalties already must be something over a hundred thousand dollars——” He stopped in confusion.

Ora’s face was radiant and she never had liked Mark as sincerely as at that moment. “It is just like him! He wanted to wait and give me a great surprise—my husband, I mean.”

“And I have spoilt it! I am really sorry. Please don’t tell him.”

“I won’t. And I’ll be the most surprised woman in the world when he takes me to the bank to sign my letter of credit. You needn’t mind. I’ll have the fun of thinking about it for five months—and rolling it up in my imagination. Ah!”

“Compton has recognised you, I think.”

Ora had met the long narrow concentrated gaze of her husband’s friend. She bowed slightly. Compton made a step forward, hesitated, braced himself, and walked toward her.

“A constitutionally shy man, but a brave one,” said Professor Becke with a grim smile, as he rose to resign his seat. “A strong magnet has pulled up many a sinking heart. Good evening, Compton. Glad you honour our party, even if you don’t dance.”

“I intend to ask Mrs. Blake to dance.” Gregory betrayed nothing of his inner trepidation although he did not smile. He could always rely upon the stern mask into which he had trained his visage not to betray him.

Ora, oblivious of her resolution not to dance, rose and placed her hand on his shoulder, smiling an absent farewell to Professor Becke. For a moment she forgot her resentful interest in this man in her astonishment that he danced so well. She had the impression of dancing with a light supple creature of the woods, one who could be quite abandoned if he chose, although he held her as if he were embracing a feather. She wondered if it were his drop of aboriginal blood and looked up suddenly. To her surprise he was smiling, and his smile so altered the immobility of his face that she lost her breath.

“I feel as if I were dancing with a snowflake,” was his unexpected remark.

“You look the last man to pay compliments and murmur sweet nothings.”

“Are you disappointed?”

“Perhaps I am. I rather liked your attitude—expression, rather—of cool superiority.”

“Why don’t you use the word prig?”

“Oh, no!—Well, perhaps that is what I did mean.”

He stopped short, regardless of the annoyance he caused several impetuous couples. “If you did I shall leave you right here.”

“I did not. Please go on. Everybody is staring at us. You took me completely by surprise.”

“I? Why?”

“You are the last man I should expect the usual small talk from.”

“Small talk? Heavens knows I have none of that. Girls used to talk my head off in self-defence. I merely said what I thought. What did you expect me to talk about?”

“Oh—mines, I suppose.” Again, to her surprise, his face lit up as if by an inner and jealously hidden torch. But he said soberly:

“Well, there is no more interesting subject. Never has been since the world began. Where shall we find a seat?”

The waltz was over. The chairs were filling. Young couples were flitting toward the embowered corners.

“Let’s go outside,” he said abruptly.

“What? On the street? And nobody goes out of doors from a ballroom in June.”

“Good reason for going. Come with me.”

He led her to the cloak-room. “Get your wrap,” he said.

Ora frowned, but she asked for her heavy white woollen wrap and put it on; then automatically followed him down the stairs and into the street.

“Why don’t you get your coat and hat?” she asked, still dazed. “It’s cold, you know.”

“I never was cold in my life,” he said contemptuously. He hailed a taxi. “I must go up to the School of Mines, and ask the result of some assaying,” he added as he almost lifted her in. “Then we can talk up there. May I smoke?”

“I don’t care what you do.”

He smiled directly into her resentful eyes this time and tucked the lap-robe about her.

XX

HE apparently forgot her during the short drive and stared through the open window of the cab, his thoughts, no doubt, in the assay room of the School, where several students, as ardent as himself, were experimenting with ore they had managed to secure from a recently opened mine. Ora’s resentment vanished, partly because she reflected that a new and original experience was a boon to be grateful for in Butte, but more because she was thrilled with the sense of adventure. Her woman’s instinct gave assurance that he had no intention of making love to her, but it also whispered that, whether she liked or disliked him when the adventure was over, she would have something to remember. And it was the first time she ever had indulged in recklessness. Butte would be by the ears on the morrow if it learned of her escapade.

When they reached the dark School of Mines he dismissed the taxi, and said to Ora, “Wait for me here. I shan’t be a moment.”

He disappeared and Ora shrugged her shoulders and sat down on the steps. He returned in a few moments and extended himself over several steps below her.

“Comfortable?” he asked.

“Very!”

“It’s a night, isn’t it?” he asked abruptly.

He was not looking at her but at the low sulphurous blue sky, with its jewelled lattice, white, yellow, green, blue. There were no tree tops to rustle, but from the window below came the voluptuous strains of the Merry Widow waltz, mingling incongruously with the raucous noises of the sleepless town: the roaring street-cars, the blasts of engines, the monstrous purr of motor-cats.

“If we could cut out that jungle,” he said with a sigh. “Are you warm enough?” He pulled the cloak about the lower part of her body. “I should have taken the rug from the cab——”

“I am warm enough,” she said impatiently, and what she longed to say was, “How in heaven’s name did you marry Ida Hook?” He had transferred his gaze to the city and she studied his face. Then she understood. In spite of its intense reserve and detachment, its strength and power, its thin sensitive mouth, it was the most passionate face she had ever seen. As a matter of fact she had been at pains to ignore the purely masculine side of men, her fastidious mind never indulging in comparisons. She half rose with a sense of panic. Again he looked up solicitously.

“I am sure you are not comfortable. I could find you some cushions——”

“Please don’t. So you love beauty?” She was deeply annoyed with herself, but could think of nothing less banal. He certainly was not easy to talk to.

“Don’t you? It would be odd if you didn’t. One reason I brought you up up here was because I wanted to look at you in the starlight where you belong—the cold starlight—not in that crowded gaudy room full of mere human beings.”

“Are you a poet? I have somehow received the impression that you are a mere walking ambition.”

“I’m no poet if you mean one of those writing fellows.” His tone expressed unmitigated scorn.

“Well, no doubt you have read a great deal of poetry, little as one would suspect it.”

“Never read a line of it except when I had to decline it at school—any more than I’ve ever read a line of fiction.”

“Well, you’ve missed a great deal,” said Ora tartly. “Poetry is an essential part of the beauty of the world, which you seem to appreciate. And the best of fiction is the best expression of current history. What do you think when you star-gaze?”

“You mean, can I think at all when I haven’t read what other men have thought?”

“No.—No doubt the most original brains are those that have not read too much, are not choked up.” Ora made this admission reluctantly, but he had caught her fairly. “Tell me at least what the stars suggest to you. About everything has been said of them that can be said. The poor old stars have been worked to death.”

“The stars above Montana are watchfires protecting the treasure below. Perhaps they are bits of her treasures, gold, silver, copper, sapphire, that flew upward in the final cataclysm.”

“I don’t know whether that is poetical or gross materialism.”

“No mines, no poets. Nearly all conquest from the dawn of history down to the Boer War has had the acquisition of mineral wealth as its real object. The civilisation that follows is incidental; it merely means that the strongest race, which, of course, knows the most, wins. If ever we have a war with Mexico, what will be the cause? Mines. Incidentally we will civilise her. Peru, Mexico, India, the Americas—all have been invaded in their turn by more civilised nations, and all after plunder. They gave as much as they took, but little they cared about that. What opened up California? This great Northwest? Prospectors in search of gold. Excuse this lecture. I am the least talkative of men, but you have jarred my brain, somehow. Read the history of mines and mining if you want romance.”

“As a matter of fact few things interest me more. I am so glad my mine has been leased for a year only. When that is up I am going to mine it myself. I’ll build a bungalow out there and go down every day. Perhaps in time I could be my own manager. At all events, think of the excitement of watching the ore as it comes up the shaft; of running through a lean vein and coming suddenly upon a chamber of an entirely different kind of ore from what you had been taking out. Great shoots full of free gold! Wire gold! Or that crisp brown-gold that looks as if it were boiling out of the ore and makes one want to bite it! Why are you staring so at me?”

His eyes were more widely opened and brilliant than she had seen them. “Do you mean that?” he asked. “I’ve a great notion to tell you something that I’ve not told anyone.”

“Do tell me!”

She leaned down eagerly. She had dismissed the feeling of panic as something to be forgotten as quickly as possible. But her brain was on fire to penetrate his. She felt an extraordinary mental stimulation. But he relapsed into absolute silence, although he held his head, lowered again, at an angle that suggested he might be thinking intently. She moved impatiently, but he sat still, staring downward, his eyes narrow once more. She noticed irrelevantly how black his hair was, and her white hand went out stealthily as if magnetised, but was immediately restored to order. In the vibrating silence she had another glimmer of understanding. He wanted to tell her something personal, but his natural secretiveness and habit of reserve were engaged in a struggle with the unusual impulse. She shifted the ground.

“I wish you would tell me something of your boyhood,” she said abruptly.

He looked up in astonishment. “I never talk about myself——”

“How very egoistical.”

“Ego——”

“No, I did not say egotistical.”

“Ah!” There was another pause, although he looked at her with a frown. “I have talked to you more than I ever talk to anyone,” he said resentfully.

“It is the stars, to say nothing of the isolation. We might be up on one of your escaped nuggets. Remember that I have heard of you constantly for six years—and met you before on one of those occasions when all persons look alike. How could I escape curiosity?”

“I brought you out to look at in the proper setting. I can’t say I had any desire to talk to you. I suppose I should not keep you out here——”

“I am much happier and more comfortable than in that hot room. But surely you need more recreation. Why do you never go to dances?”

“Dances? I? I only went tonight——” He, too, apparently, was determined to keep their respective spouses out of the conversation, for he veered off quickly. “It is a sort of religion to attend the Prom even if you only show yourself. I was about to beat a retreat when I saw you. Of course it was my duty to shake hands. Besides, I wanted to see if you were real.” And he smiled up into her eyes.

“Do you know that we are flirting?”

“Well, let us flirt,” he replied comfortably. “I haven’t the least idea what it is, but I am not a bit in love with you, if that is what you mean.”

Ora drew herself up rigidly. “Well, you are——” she began, aware that she had a temper. Then she laughed. Why quarrel with a novel experience? Her anger turned into a more subtle emotion. She was well aware of the dazzling brightness of her eyes. She leaned forward and concentrated her mind in an attempt to project her magnetism through them, although again with a feeling of panic; it was too much like the magnet rushing out to the iron.

He returned that powerful gaze unmoved, although an expression of perplexity crossed his own eyes. She was disconcerted and asked lamely:

“Is it true that you used to run away and prospect in the mountains?”

His face lit up with an enthusiasm her fascinations had been unable to inspire; and a richer note came into his voice. “I was eleven the first time and stayed out for six months. Two years after I ran away again. The next time I went with my father’s permission. I worked in one of the Butte mines one summer—but otherwise—well, you see, there is a good deal to do on a ranch. This is the first time I have been able to do as I please.”

Ora looked at his long slim figure, his brown hands that tonight, at least, expressed a sort of cruel deliberate repose. Whatever they may have been in their ranch days they were smooth and well cared for now.

“Somehow, I can’t see you handling a pick,” she said doubtfully. “Is it true that you intend to work in the mines all summer?”

“Part of it—when I am not working in a mill or a smelter. I’d be ashamed of myself if I couldn’t do anything that another man can do. Some of the best miners look like rats.”

He looked like a highly-bred mettlesome race-horse himself, and Ora wondered, as she had before tonight: “Where did he get it? Who were his ancestors?” She had seen dukes that looked like farm hands, and royal princesses that might have been upper housemaids, but her feminine (and American) mind clung to the fallacy that it takes generations to produce the clean-cut shell. She determined to look up his family tree in Holland.

“Well—Custer—my housekeeper—will look after you,” she said as naturally as if her thoughts had not wandered for a moment. “Shall you do any mining on your own place before we come back from Europe?”

He started and looked at her apprehensively, then scowled.

“What is the matter? You may not know it but at this moment your face looks like an Indian battle-axe.”

To her surprise he laughed boyishly. “You startled me. I have heard of mind readers. Well, I will tell you what I wanted to a while back. But you must promise not to tell—anyone.”

“I promise! I swear it! And do hurry. I’m afraid you’ll shut up tight again.”

“No, I won’t. I don’t know that I’d tell you were it not that your own mine is just over the border; we may have to consolidate some day to save a lawsuit—No, I will be honest; I really want to tell you. It is this: Close to the northeast boundary line of my ranch is an almost barren hill of limestone and granite. Shortly before I left—last October—I discovered float on the side of the hill. There is no doubt in my mind that we have both come upon a new mineral belt, although whether we are in the middle or on one edge of it is another question.”

He told her the story of the storm and of the uncovering of the float. Nor did he end his confidence with a bare statement of fact. He told her of his sensations as he sat on the ragged ground leaning against the roots of the slain trees, his mental struggle, and final resolution. Then he told her of the hopes and dreams of his boyhood, and what it had meant to him—this sudden revelation that he had a mine under his feet—and all his own! He talked for half an hour, with the deep satisfaction that only a shy and silent person feels when talking into a sympathetic mind for the first time. Ora listened with a curious sense of excitement, as if she were overboard in a warm and pleasant but unknown sea. There were times when she felt like talking very fast herself. But she did nothing of the sort, merely jogging him diplomatically when he showed signs of relapsing into silence. Finally he stopped in the middle of a sentence and said abruptly:

“That’s all.”

“Oh! And you really have made up your mind not to begin work for a year?”

“Quite!”

“But—have you thought—it is only tonight I learned that the engineers who leased my mine have struck a rich vein. Suppose it dips toward yours——”

“It does——”

“Have they put on a big force?”

“Naturally. They are rushing things, as they know they will not get the mine another year.”

“Well, suppose their vein runs under your hill—through their side-line?”

He stirred uneasily. “I am watching them. So far the dip is very slight. It may take a turn, or go down straight; or,” and he smiled at her again, “it may pinch out. Nothing is so uncertain as an ore vein.”

“Do you think it will?” asked Ora anxiously.

“No, don’t worry. I was down the other day; and did some prospecting on my own account besides. I think you’ve got a big mine.”

“But suppose the vein should take a sudden dip to the right—you don’t want them burrowing under your hill——”

“They won’t burrow under my hill,” he said grimly. “I should persuade them that there was an even richer vein on their left.”

“Is there?”

“I have reason to think so. They naturally would want to avoid the expenses of a lawsuit, and of course they would waste a lot of time sinking a shaft or driving across. Their lease would be pretty well up by the time——”

“You are cold-blooded! What of me? I should be making nothing, either.”

“You’d make it all later on. How much do you expect to spend in Europe anyway? You must have made a thousand dollars a day since the first carload of ore was smelted.”

She was on the point of replying that a woman could not have enough money in Europe, when she remembered the conspiracy to make him believe that a thousand dollars would cover the expenses of his wife.

“Oh, it is merely that I don’t like being one of the pawns in your game,” she said.

“You’d have all the more later on. Ore doesn’t run away.”

“How can you stay away from your mine? I feel—after all that you have told me!—that you are wild to get at it?”

“So I am! So I am! But I said I wouldn’t and that is the end of it. I want that last year at the School.”

“What shall you do with all that money—if your hill turns out to be full of gold? More, I hope, than the rest of our millionaires have done for Montana—which is exactly nothing. You might give the State a complete irrigating system.”

“Good idea! Perhaps I will. But that is in the future. I want the fun first——”

“Fun? It is the passion of your life, your great romance. You’ll never love a woman like that.”

“Of course not.” But he was staring at her. He had a sensation of something swimming in the depths of his mind, striving to reach the surface. He changed his position suddenly and sat up. “And you?” he asked. “You have the same vision. Couldn’t you feel the same absorbing passion——”

“For ore?” The scorn of her entire sex was in her voice. “Dead cold metal——”

“Every molecule, every individual atom is alive and quivering——”

“I am not interested in chemistry.”

He still stared at her. Her cheeks were scarlet, her eyes blazing. She sprang to her feet.

“Ida is the wife for you! She’ll never ask much of you and you never could hurt her, not even if you tried, she is fortunate in lacking just that which you could hurt.”

“What is it?” He spoke eagerly. He, too, had risen, his eyes still on her face. Unconsciously he held his breath.

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand it I told you—and I haven’t the least desire to tell you. She will make you comfortable, do you credit when you are a rich man, spend your money royally. That is all you will ask of her. Now, I’ll go back.”

He was a step or two below her. Their eyes were on a level. He looked at her sombrely for a moment, then walked past her up the steps.

“You need not call a cab. I shall go home. I should only set them all talking if I appeared in the ballroom again. You can tell Mark that I didn’t feel well and that you took me home.”

They walked along the high terrace until they found a point of easy descent.

“What have I said to make you angry?” he asked.

Ora laughed with determined good humour. “It was not I. It was merely my sex that flared up. Please forget it.”

“I want to thank you for what you have done for Ida,” he said abruptly, and it was evident that the words cost him more than his former revelations. “It was a great thing for you to do.”

“Oh, Ida has become my most intimate friend. I have never enjoyed Butte so much as in these last few months.”

“Has she? And Mark is my best friend.” He jerked his head in annoyance; manifestly the remark had been too spontaneous. They were before her gate. She extended a limp hand, but he held it firmly. He was smiling again although he looked depressed.

“Do give me a friendly shake,” he said. “I do like you and you will be going in a few days.”

“I do not go for five months.”

“You can go next week. I’ll square it with Mark.”

“I don’t wish to go next week. Besides, Mark expects some important people here in the autumn, and needs my help. He has a deal on.”

“I’ll dispossess Mark of any such notion. It’s all nonsense, this idea of a man’s needing his wife’s help in business. It’s a poor sort of man that can’t manage his own affairs, and Mark is not a poor sort. Now, you are angry again!”

“That would be foolish of me,” she said icily. “You merely don’t understand. You never could. Do you want to get rid of me?” she asked abruptly.

“Yes, I think I do.”

Then Ora relented. She also gave him the smile that she reserved as her most devastating weapon. “I am sorry,” she murmured, “but I don’t think I can be ready for at least three months. Nor Ida.”

“You go next week,” he said.

And go they did.

XXI

GREGORY and Mark established their wives comfortably in a drawing-room of the limited for Chicago, asked the usual masculine questions about tickets and trunk checks, expressed their masculine surprise that nothing had been forgotten, told them to be careful not to lean over the railing of the observation car, nor to make themselves ill with the numerous boxes of candy sent to the train, admonished them not to spend too much money in New York, to send their trunks to the steamer the day before they sailed, and give themselves at least two hours to get to the docks; above all not to mislay their letters of credit; then kissed them dutifully, and, as the train moved out, stood on the platform with solemn faces and hearts of indescribable buoyancy.

“My Lord!” exclaimed Ida, as she blew her last kiss. “If Greg was going along I’d have to take care of him every step of the way. I wouldn’t trust him with the tickets the length of the train. Men do make me tired. They keep up the farce that we’re children just to keep up that other grand farce that they run the Universe. Any old plank to cling to.”

Ora kept her sentiments to herself.

If Mark, who was fond of his wife, and more or less dependent upon her, wondered vaguely that he should rejoice in the prospect of six months of bachelorhood, Gregory was almost puzzled. Ida was now no more to him personally than a responsibility he had voluntarily assumed and was determined to treat with complete justice; but at least she made him more comfortable than he had ever been before, and he had trained her to let him alone. Since her rapid improvement her speech had ceased to irritate him; she was never untidy, never anything but a pleasant picture to look at. He had also noted on the night of the party that she was indisputably the handsomest woman in the room and received the homage of men with dignity and poise. He had felt proud of her, and comfortably certain that he could trust her. Altogether a model wife.

Nevertheless as he walked out Park Street after he left Mark at his office (Ida not only had sent his personal possessions to the Blake house but found time to unpack and put them away) his brain, which had been curiously depressed during the past week, felt as if full of effervescing wine.

“Jove!” he thought, “why do men marry? What has any woman living to give a man half as good as his freedom.”

His freedom was to be reasonably complete. He had told Ida to expect no letters from him and not to write herself unless she were in trouble. With all the fervour of his masculine soul he hated to write letters. Long since he had bought a typewriter, on which he rattled off necessary business communications so briefly that they would have cost him little more on the wire. He knew that he should hear constantly of his wife’s welfare from Mark, and had no desire to be inflicted with descriptions of scenery and shops.

He felt a spasm of envy, however, as he thought of the letters Mark would receive from Ora. Her letters, no doubt, would be worth reading, not only because she had a mind, and already had seen too much of Europe to comment on its obvious phases, but because they would be redolent of her subtle exquisite personality. He had once come upon a package of old letters among his mother’s possessions and read them. They had been written by his great-great-grandmother to her husband while he was a soldier in the War of the Revolution. It was merely the simple life of the family, the farm, and the woods, that she described, but Gregory never recalled those letters without feeling again the subtle psychological emanation of the writer’s sweet and feminine but determinate personality; it hovered like a wraith over the written words, imprisoned, imperishable, until the paper should fall to dust. So, he imagined, something of Ora’s essence would take wing on the rustling sheets of her letters.

But the spasm of envy passed. Ora would write no such letters to Mark Blake. Her correspondence with her husband would be perfunctory, practical, brief. To some man she might write pages that would keep him up at night, reading and rereading, interpreting illusive phrases, searching for hidden and personal meanings, while two individualities met and melted.... But this yearning passed also. To receive such letters a man must answer them and that would be hell.

He was on his way to change his clothes for overalls and get his blue dinner pail, well filled, from Custer. But before he reached the house he conceived an abrupt and violent distaste for life underground, an uncontrollable desire—or one which he made no effort to control—for long rides over the ranch, and a glimpse of Limestone Hill. It was seven months since he had seen his ranch save in snatches, and he wanted it now for months on end. He was not a town-bred man, and he suddenly hated the sight of Butte with her naked angles and feverish energies. He realised also that his mind insistently demanded a rest. To be sure he had intended to work in the mines for eight hours of the day, but he had planned to study for ten. Well, he would have none of it! Caprice was no characteristic of his, but he felt full of it this brilliant morning. If the air was so light in Butte that his feet seemed barely to touch the ground, so clear that the mountains seemed walking down the valley, what must it be in the country?

He went rapidly to the house, left a message for Mark, packed a suit-case and took the next train for Pony. There he hired a horse and rode to his ranch.

One of the sudden June rains had come while he was in the train. It had ceased, but a mass of low clouds brushing the higher tree tops was almost black. Their edges were silver: they were filled with a cold imprisoned sunlight, which transformed the distant mountains into glass, transparent, with black shadows in their depths. Montana looked as giving an exhibition of her astral body. But as he rode the clouds drifted away, the sky deepened to the rich voluptuous blue of that high altitude; even the grey soil showing through the thin grass of the granite hills looked warmer. Where the soil was thicker the ground was covered with a gorgeous tapestry of wildflowers; the birds sang desperately as if they knew how short was their springtime, affected like mortals by the thin intoxicating air. Even the waters in the creek roared as if making the most of their brief span. The mountains lost their glassy look; blue, ice-topped, they were as full of young and vivid life as when they danced about, heedless that the heaving earth purposed they should wait for centuries before settling into things of beauty for unborn man to admire. They never will look old, those mountains of Montana; man may take the treasure from their veins and the jewels from their crowns, but they drink forever the elixir of the air. The blue dawn fills their spirit with a deathless exultation, the long blue-gold days their bodies with immortal life, the starry nights, swinging their lamps so close to the snow fields, unroll the dramas of other worlds. They are no mere masses of rock and dirt or even of metal, these mountains of Montana, but man’s vision of eternal youth.

Gregory drew rein on the crest of one of his own hills. Below lay the De Smet ranch, and he drew a long breath with that sensation of serene pride which comes to men when they contemplate their landed possessions, or their wives on state occasions. All the arable soil, on flat and hillside, was green; alfalfa, with its purple flowers, filled the bottoms; the winter wheat was rippling in the wind; the acres covered with the tender leaves of young flax were like a densely woven lawn. On the hills and the public range roamed his cattle. All of this fair land, including its possible treasure, was his, absolutely. By the terms of his father’s will he paid yearly dividends from the sale of steers and crops to three aunts, now reduced to two. Whether by accident or design, Mr. Compton had omitted all mention of “minerals under the earth.” Gregory had not the least objection to making these ladies rich, when his mines yielded their wealth, but he was jealous of every acre of his inheritance, far more of its secrets. All the passionate intensity of his nature he had poured out on his land and its subterranean mysteries, and he would have hailed an invention which would enable him to dismiss every man from his employ. But his head was hard and he always smiled grimly at the finish of his fanciful desires.

He turned his horse toward the distant group of farm buildings, then wheeled abruptly and rode toward Limestone Hill. He had anticipated a long talk with the enthusiastic Oakley on the subject of crops, but he suddenly realised that he was in no mood to talk to anyone and that his secret reason for coming to the ranch was to visit his hill. Oakley would cling to him for hours. One glance had assured him that the crops would have satisfied a state experimental farm. Mining would fascinate him in its every detail, but as far as agriculture was concerned, he was interested only in results.

As he rode toward the hill he frowned at the signs of activity on the other side of his boundary line. A large gasoline hoist had been installed. The waste dump was almost as high as a hill, four “double-sixes”—six-horse teams—stood waiting to be loaded from the ore bins. There were a group of miners’ cabins, a long mess-house, and a blacksmith’s shop. This was the only shadow on his future: he wanted no lawsuits, nor did he want to enter into partnership with anyone, not even Ora Blake.

But he dismissed the matter from his mind, tied his horse, and, although Montanans are a slow race on foot out of deference to the altitude, ran up the hill. A glance told him that his secret was undiscovered. He knelt down and dug up the float, his heart hammering. And then he deliberately let the prospector’s fever take possession of him. The soles of his feet prickled as if responding to the magnets below; he had a fancy that gold, molten, was running through his veins. But his brain worked clearly. He was aware that his exultation and excitement were not due to the lure of gold alone, but to the still more subtle pleasure that a strong and obstinate nature feels in breaking a vow and deliberately succumbing to temptation. He had vowed in good faith that he would not open his mine until the third of June of the following year. But a week before he had spent an enchanted hour with a woman, and during the rest of that night—he had walked half way to Silver Bow and back—he had wanted that woman more than he had ever wanted anything on earth. He had forgotten his mine.

At first he had lashed himself with scorn, remembering his infatuation for the woman he had married. He felt something of the indignant astonishment of the small boy who imagines himself catching a second attack of measles, before he discovers it is scarlet fever. But it took him only a brief time to realise that the passion inspired by Ora Blake was so much deeper and more various than the blind subservience to Nature that had driven him to Ida (who had not the least idea of being a tool of Nature herself) that it was far more dangerous than the first inevitable attack of youthful madness could ever be. It humiliated his pride to have been the mere victim of the race, the rudimentary male swept into matrimony by the first woman who combined superlative femaleness with virtue. Then he wondered if he could have loved Ora at that time; he certainly felt ten years older today.

The word love brought him to his senses. It was formidable and definite. While he had believed himself to be in the throes of a second fever caught from a beautiful woman’s concordant magnetism, he had felt merely disgusted at his weakness, not in the least disloyal to his closest friend, whom he knew no woman could tempt him to betray. But he realised with hideous abruptness that if he were thrown with Ora Blake for any length of time she would become so necessary to him through the comprehensive appeal, which he only half understood, that he no more could pluck her out of him by the roots, as men disposed of the superficial passion when it became inconvenient, than he could tear the veins out of his hill with his hands.

He had felt the danger dimly when with her, although he had made up his mind even then to get her out of Montana as quickly as possible. He vowed anew, with the first sensation of panic he had ever experienced, that the same sky should not cover them a week hence. He knew his influence over Mark Blake.

Then he made a deliberate attempt to banish the subject from his mind, ordering his thoughts to their favorite haunts underground. But one little insidious tract, so difficult to control in all brains still young and human, showed a disposition to create startling and vivid pictures, to dream intensely, to cast up this woman’s face, fling it into his consciousness, with an automatic regularity that was like a diabolical challenge to his haughty will.

He endeavoured to think of Ora with contempt: she had married a good fellow, but one whom she must have been compelled by the circumstances of her life to regard as her social inferior, and who assuredly was in no sense suited to her—merely from a parasitic dread of poverty. Other women went to work, even if delicately nurtured. But he was too masculine and too little influenced by certain phases of modern thought to condemn any woman long for turning to man in her extremity. Privately he detested women that “did things”; better for them all to give some man the right to protect them: marriage with a good fellow like Mark Blake, even without love, spoilt them far less than mixing up with the world in a scramble for bread. It would have spoilt Ora, who was now merely undeveloped; hardened, sharpened, coarsened her. He dismissed his abortive attempt to despise her; also a dangerous tendency to pity her.

Before he finished his tramp he had recaptured his poise. What a woman like Ora Blake might have to give him he dared not think of, nor would he be betrayed again into speculation. Doubtless it was all rubbish anyway, merely another trick of the insatiable mating instinct. If it were more—the primal instinct plus the almost equally insistent demands of the civilised inheritances in the brain—so much the worse, the more reason to “cut it out.” But when he returned to the cottage in East Granite Street he threw himself on the divan in the parlour and slept there.

XXII

THEREFORE was he in no mood to fight another temptation; rather to take a sardonic pleasure in succumbing. An hour later, in overalls, and assisted by two of his labourers, outwardly more excited than he, for they had worked underground and vowed they smelt ore, he was running an open cut along the line of the float. As there was no outcropping it was mere guesswork; it might be weeks before he struck any definite sign of an ore body, but he was prepared to level the hill if necessary. Until he did come upon indications that would justify the expense, however, he was resolved not to sink a shaft nor drive a tunnel.

They used pick and shovel until at the depth of eight feet they struck rock. Gregory had been prepared for this and sent the unwilling but interested Oakley into Pony for drills and powder. For two days more they drilled and blasted; then—Gregory took out his watch and noted the hour, twenty-three minutes after four—one of the men gave a shout and tossed a fragment into the air.

“Stringer, by jinks!” he cried. “And it’s copper carbonate or I’m a dead ’un.”

Gregory frowned, but laid the bit of ore gently on his palm and regarded it with awe. He wanted gold, but at least this was his, and the first of his treasure to be torn from its sanctuary. For a moment the merely personal longing was lost in the enthusiasm of the geologist, for the fragment in his hand was very beautiful, a soft rich shaded green flecked with red; the vugs, or little cells, looked as if lined with deep green velvet.

But he turned and stared at the mining camp beyond his boundary line. One of the bits of float he had found last year had been gold quartz. Had it travelled, a mere chip, from the original body to this distant point, or danced here on the shoulders of an earthquake? Float, even under a layer of soil was often found so far from the ore body, that it was a more fallible guide than a prospector’s guess. He walked to the end of the hill, while his miners shrugged their shoulders and resumed the drilling.

The great vein of the Primo mine was dipping acutely to the right. Might it not be wise for him to abandon his present position and sink a shaft close to the line, trusting to his practical knowledge and highly organized faculty to strike the vein?

He stood for half an hour debating the question, listening to the intermittent roar of the engine, the rattle of ore dumped from the buckets. Then he walked back to the red gash in his own land. It would be the bitterest disappointment of his life if he failed to find gold in his hill, but the dominant voice in his brain was always practical, and it advised him to follow the willing metal for the present instead of incurring the expense of a shaft and possible litigation.

“’Nother stringer!” announced one of the men, as Gregory arrived at the long deep cut. “Guess it’s time for a windlass.”

“Guess it is. Go down to the house and get some lumber.”

He descended into the cut and looked at the unmistakable evidence of little veins. Were they really stringer, tentacles of a great ore body climbing toward the surface, or a mere series of independent and insignificant veins not worth exploiting? He was in a pessimistic mood, but laughed suddenly as he realised how disappointed he would be should further excavation demonstrate there was no chamber of copper ore below.

Four hours later the windlass was finished and four men were at work. At the end of the fortnight the windlass had been discarded in favor of a gasoline hoist, and twenty-five men in three shifts were employed upon a chamber of copper carbonate ore. The nearest of the De Smet hills began to take on the appearance of a mining camp; a mess-house and a number of cabins were building. Trees were falling, not only to make room for the new “town” but to timber the mine when the time came to sink or drift. At present those of the miners that could not be housed by the disgusted Oakley occupied tents or rude shacks. Oakley spent the greater part of his time escorting the great six-horse teams from the ranch to the public road, as their drivers showed an indifference to his precious crops only rivalled by Gregory Compton’s.

Mark took a week’s vacation after the first carload of ore had been shipped from Pony to the sampling works in Butte and netted $65 a ton. Gregory, who was working with his men, far too impatient and surcharged with energy to walk about as mere manager, paid scant attention to him during the day; but Mark was content to sit on the edge of the cut and smoke and calculate, merely retreating in haste when the men lit the fuses.

On the third morning, as he was approaching the mine at dawn with his host, Gregory suddenly announced his intention of sending for a manager; he purposed to sink a shaft on the edge of the chamber in order to determine if the present lode was the top of a vein.

“Better take off your coat and go to work,” he added. “Do you good. You’re getting too fat.”

“Getting? Thanks. But I don’t mind. You’ve got several hundred thousand dollars in that chamber by the looks of things, but I suppose that wouldn’t satisfy you?”

“Lord, no. That is merely the necessary capital to mine the entire hill—or fight the powers that be when they get on to the fact that I’ve got another Anaconda.”

“Do you believe it? Big pockets have been found in solitary splendor before this.”

“This hill is mineral from end to end,” said Gregory with intense conviction. “And I want to get to the main lode as quickly as possible.”

“By the way,” said Mark abruptly, “why don’t you locate your claim?”

“Locate? Why, the land’s mine. Patent is all right. My father even patented several placer claims——”

“Mining laws are fearful and wonderful things. Judges, with a fat roll in their pockets, have been known to make fearful and wonderful interpretations before this. If you’ve struck a new copper belt—well, the enemy has billions. Better stake off the entire hill, and apply for patents. You may be grey before you get them, but the application is enough——”

“It would cost a lot of money, and I don’t like the idea of paying twice over. This is costing thousands——”

“And you’ll soon be taking out thousands a week. But if you need it all I’ll lend you the money. It would be a good investment for Ora. You can pay me four per cent. I’ve a mind to go ahead today and begin staking off.”

Gregory stood still with his head inclined at the angle which indicated that he was concentrating his mind. “Very well,” he said curtly. “Go ahead. And I don’t need your money. Stake off every inch of the hill and have a good map made. See that the side lines are flush with the boundary. Of course I’d never have any trouble with you, but Mrs. Blake might take it into her head to sell. Get out a surveyor when you’re ready for him. Don’t bother me until the thing is done.”

Mark took a longer vacation and worked off some twenty pounds. He wished ruefully that Ora would return suddenly, for he doubted that his love of good living would undo the excellent work when he was once more in Butte. He employed a U. S. deputy mineral surveyor, the map was made, Gregory applied for his patents; the lawyers’s mind was at rest for the present, although he kept his ears open in Butte.

Gregory sank his shaft ostensibly to determine the dip and width of the vein leading from the chamber, but secretly with the hope of meeting the body of ore already uncovered in the Primo Mine. He was elated with his splendid “find” and sudden wealth, but his old dream never left him for a moment. Indeed he would have been more than willing to miss the pyroxenite if he could come upon a lode of quartz containing free gold. That was what he had visualised all his life. He wanted to stand in his own stopes and flash his lantern along glittering seams, not merely send masses of decomposed grey-black ore to the sampling works and await returns. If he found a vein worth the outlay he would erect his own stamp mill and listen to its music. Such is the deathless boy that exists in all men. Mere wealth meant far less to him than the beautiful costly toy to play with for a while.

The shaft at the end of a month had gone down eighty feet; but had revealed only a lean vein of copper carbonates which made him forget his dreams in the fear that his mine was pinching out. But he persisted, and one morning when he went to the bottom of the shaft after the smoke of the blast had cleared away, and lit his candle, he picked up a lump of yellow ore that glittered like quartz packed with free gold. For a moment his head swam. He knelt down and brushed the shattered rock from several other bits of what looked like virgin gold; and he caressed them as gently as if they had been the cheek of his first born. But he was a geologist. He stepped into the ascending bucket a prey to misgivings. As soon as he examined his treasure in the sunlight he knew it at once for chalcopyrite—the great copper ore of the sulphide zone.

After he had assayed it he philosophically dismissed regret. It ran $26 in copper with slight values of gold and silver. Chalcopyrite ore, as a rule, runs about five per cent. in copper, its commercial value lying in the immense quantities in which it may be found, although it is necessary to concentrate at the mine. If he had struck one of the rare veins of massive chalcopyrite, averaging $25 a ton, he would take out, after it was sufficiently developed, several thousand dollars a day; and, like the carbonates, it could go straight to the smelter. As a matter of fact the vein when uncovered proved to be six feet wide and grew slightly broader with depth. The miners were jubilant over their “fool’s gold”, and a number of people came out and asked for the privilege of looking at what the foreman, Joshua Mann, declared to be the prettiest pay streak in Montana.

Gregory found his chalcopyrite during the third month after he began to investigate the hill. The chamber already had netted him over a hundred thousand dollars and grew richer with depth. He put an extra force at work on the promising shoot.

In the Primo Mine the luck varied. The two engineers, Osborne and Douglas, exhausted the first lode, struck a poor vein, averaging ten dollars a ton, then ran into a body of the ore netting as high as four hundred dollars. Two months later they came up suddenly against a wall of country rock. Undaunted, they drove through the mass, and struck a lean shoot of chalcopyrite.

XXIII

“WELL, what do you know about that?”

Mark’s feet were on the table in the cabin Gregory had had built for himself on the top of the hill. The news had just been brought to them by one of the men who had a faithful friend in the Primo Mine.

Gregory was engaged in biting a cigar to pieces. He waited some ten minutes before replying, during which Mark smoked philosophically. “I think this,” he said finally, “what those fellows are after is gold, not copper. Better suggest to them to get out an expert geologist—Holmes is a good friend of mine—who will tell them to sink a shaft over on the right, or run a drift from the original stope. All we need is time.”

“I’m on. But will they do it? They’re not fools and what they’re after mainly is cash.”

“I think they’ll listen to reason. They’re not far from the boundary line and there’s no possible doubt that the vein apexes here. The moment they cross the line I’ll get out an injunction. That would stop them anyhow, hold them up until their lease had expired. And their chance is good to recover the vein on the other side. No doubt it has faulted. Have you noticed those aspens about a hundred yards beyond their shaft? Where there are aspens there is water. Now as there is no water in sight it must be below the surface, and that would indicate faulting. There might be no ore on the other side, but the chance is worth taking. Better have a talk with Osborne tomorrow. He’s the least mulish of the two.”

“Good. I might offer them some inducement—give them an extra month or two. Even so we’d win out. But they’re not the only danger ahead. How long since you’ve been in Butte?”

“Not since I began work.”

“Well, let me tell you that Amalgamated is buzzing. They’ve got on to the fact good and plenty that you’ve got the biggest thing in copper that has been struck in Montana for twenty years. Of course they get figures regularly from the sampling works. They know you’ve already taken out half a million dollars worth of ore—net—and that the new shoot is getting richer every minute. They’re talking loud about spoiling the market and all the rest of it. Of course that’s rank nonsense. What worries them is a rival in Montana. If your mine was in Colorado or Michigan they wouldn’t care shucks. You haven’t taken out enough yet to worry them about the market. But if they can queer your game they’ll do it. Lucky for you the smelting works need copper just now as badly as you need them. If it were not for that strike in the Stemwinder and the Corkscrew you might be having trouble.”

Gregory smiled, but as he set his jaw at the same time it was not an agreeable smile. “I’m in a mood to fight somebody—and win. I wanted gold and didn’t get it. A row with Amalgamated would relieve my feelings—although I’d rather use my fists.”

“They’re mad, too, because you’ve named your mine ‘Perch of the Devil.’ That’s the old name for Butte, and they look upon it as a direct challenge.”

“So it is. And you don’t suppose I’d call my mine Limestone Hill, do you? I shouldn’t get half the fun out of it. What the devil can they do, anyhow?”

“That’s what I’m worrying about. You never know what Amalgamated has up its sleeve. There was just one man who was too much for them—for a while—and that was Heinze. And they got him in the end. I believe you’d give them a run for their money, and I don’t rank you second to Heinze or any other man when it comes to brains or resource. But—well, they’ve got billions—and the best legal talent in the state.”

“You deserve a return compliment. You may consider yourself counsel for Perch of the Devil Mine.”

“Jimminy! But I’d like a chance at them.” Mark’s cigar was burning his fingers but he only felt the fire in his brain. “Do you mean it?”

“Who else? Watch them. Put spies on them. Fight them with their own weapons. They’ve spies among my miners. That doesn’t worry me a bit. I merely mention it. Let’s change the subject. I’ve got to sleep tonight. What’s the news from Europe?”

“I’ve got Ora’s last letter here; want to hear it?”

“Good Lord, no. Tell me what they are doing. I sent Ida five thousand dollars a few days ago, so I suppose they’re flying high. She cabled her thanks and said they were both well.”

“Don’t you really know what they’ve been doing?”

“Not a thing.”

“Well—let’s see. They went over in June. They did France, Germany—lot of places in regulation tourist style—incidentally met several of Mrs. Stratton’s old friends. Then they went back to Paris, where they appear to have indulged in an orgy of clothes preparatory to a round of country house visits on the Continent and in England. Ora writes with great enthusiasm of—er—Ida’s improvement. Says you’d think she’d been on top all her life, especially since she got those Paris duds, and met a lot of smart people; makes a hit with everybody, and will astonish Butte when she comes back.”

“That will please her!” He felt no glow of tenderness, but some satisfaction that he could gratify the ambitions of the woman he had married. He was still too keen on his own youthful dreams, and thankful at their partial fulfillment, not to sympathise with those of others.

Mark left him to accept the more commodious hospitality of Oakley, and Gregory sat for another hour smoking, hoping for the mood of sleep. But the news had excited him, and he preferred to sit up rather than to toss about his narrow bed. The last part of the conversation, however, had given a new turn to his thoughts. Suddenly, unbidden, Ora flashed into his mind and refused to be dislodged. He walked up and down, striving to banish her as he had done before, when, sleepless, she had peremptorily demanded his attention. Tonight she was almost a visible presence in the little room.

He sat down again and grimly permitted his mind to dwell upon his long communion with her on the steps of the School of Mines. He tried to analyse his impulse to take her there. Unconventional as he was it had never occurred to him to do such a thing before, and there were twenty women in the room whom he would have expected to exercise a more potent fascination had he been in the humour for a flirtation. He had been quite honest in telling Ora that he had taken her out merely to look at her under the stars, and in intimating that to make love to her was the last thing in his mind. She had hardly seemed a woman at all there in the ballroom or when he first sat at her feet; his mind was relaxed and the “queer” romantic or poetical streak that he often deprecated had taken possession of it; if he had had a suspicion of anything more he would have fled from her at once, for she was the wife of his friend. As it was he merely had dismissed Mark from his mind and tried the experiment of setting a bit of exquisite white poetry to the music of the stars....

As often as her memory had assailed him he had longed to rehearse that scene; the conversation, desultory and personal; her white profile against the flaming blue sky; the intensity and brilliancy of her eyes, so unlooked for in her young almost colorless face; her pink mouth that changed its expression so often; her curious magnetism, so unlike that of the full-blooded woman—all of that and something more; the strange community of mind—or soul?—that had drawn him on to pour out his secret self into another self of whose contact he was almost literally sensible,—in a sudden desire for comprehension that had been like the birth of a new star in his mental constellation. He had felt the thrill of her sympathy, her understanding, then another thrill of perplexity, fear; then the little quarrel, when he had thought her more adorable than ever, and no longer bearing the least resemblance to a star-wraith, but wholly feminine. When he left her it was with the confused sense that he had sojourned for a bit with the quintessence of womanhood whom Nature had cast in a new and perilous mould.

He went over the hour again and again, hoping to bore himself, to arrive at the conclusion that it had been a mere commonplace flirtation with a coquette who was as cold as she looked. But he found the recaptured scene very sweet. The power of concentration he possessed enabled him to shut out the little room and sit at the feet of the woman whose magic personality had penetrated the barriers he so jealously had built about his soul and given him the first sense of companionship he had ever known.

He was filled with a longing that shook him and hurt him, to feel that sense of sympathetic companionship, of spiritual contact, again. And far more. He knew that she had loved no man, that all the glory and the riches within her were waiting—and if she had waited, and he had waited, and they had met unfettered that night——

He sprang to his feet. His face in the smoky light looked black.

“God!” he muttered. “God! Have I fallen as low as that? If ever I think of her again I’ll cut my heart out. I hope to God the Amalgamated puts up the hell of a fight. What I want is a man’s work in the world, not a play actor’s.”

XXIV

A WEEK later, Gregory, who was down in the bottom of the shaft, received a message by way of a descending miner that a gentleman from Butte, one Mr. John Robinson, requested the favour of an interview, and awaited him in the cabin on the top of the hill. At least such is the polite translation of the message as delivered: “Say, Boss, there’s a guy upstairs in your shack what says he’s from Butte, and’s come out to have a chin with you—some important. Says his name is John Robinson.”

Gregory swore under his breath and for a minute his face looked ugly and formidable. But as he stepped into the bucket and gave the signal he permitted his expression to change to one of grim amusement. Mr. Robinson was one of the brilliant galaxy that guided the legal footsteps of “Amalgamated”; that powerful company, financed by Standard Oil, which owned thirty-one of the mines of Butte openly, and exerted a power in Montana far exceeding that of state or nation.

Gregory wore corduroy trousers and coat, and these as well as his face and hands were white with “muck”, a mixture of rock-dust and water which spattered everyone in the vicinity of the ore drills; but he wasted no time to clean up before climbing to his cabin to meet the ambassador from Amalgamated.

Mr. Robinson, a portly gentleman, still young, but manifestly the victim of easy fortune, rose from his chair before the stove and greeted his host with beaming smile and extended hand.

“My dear Mr. Compton!” he exclaimed. “It is a great pleasure to meet you again. Of course you have forgotten me for I was two grades above you in the High, when you were a little chap——”

“What have you come here for? Out with it! I’ve no time to waste. Sit down if you like.”

Mr. Robinson colored angrily. He knew little of the man with whom he had come to deal, but had always relied upon his urbanity and Western heartiness to “make a hit.” He knew Mark Blake and, although he had heard, like others, of Gregory Compton’s record at the School of Mines, he had assumed that he was a mere student, and in other respects more or less the same sort of man as his chum. This man looked unlike any he had ever met. He concealed his chagrin, however, and resumed his seat.

“Really, Mr. Compton, you are somewhat abrupt——”

“Get down to business. What does Amalgamated want?”

Mr. Robinson wisely took the cue.

“To buy you out.”

“How much will they pay?”

“How much do you want?”

“What do they offer?”

“Well, between you and me. I fancy they might go as high as a hundred thousand.”

“Tell them to go to hell.”

“How much do you want?”

“A hundred millions.”

“Good God, man, are you mad!”

“If you had permitted me to finish. I should have added—in other words, nothing. There isn’t money enough inside of Montana, let alone on top, to buy one acre of this ranch.”

“But—you know what most mines are—pockety—yours may peter out any minute.”

“All right. I take the chances.”

“The history of Butte Hill is unique. There will never be another——”

“How do you know?”

“It stands to reason——”

“Why?”

“Oh, Lord, man, if you are indulging in wild dreams——!”

“My dreams concern no one but myself. I’m satisfied with my hill and that’s all there is to it.”

“I’m afraid not. Look here, you are a fine young fellow with a big future—people talk a lot about you—I don’t want to see you crushed——”

“You won’t.”

“I’m not here to make threats, but you are not so—ah—unsophisticated as to imagine that if Amalgamated sets out to get rid of you, you can stand up against them?”

“They can’t do a damned thing and you know it. They might have a few years ago, when a roll could be passed on the street to a judge who was to deny or grant an injunction within a few hours, and at a time when there was no prospect of the referendum and recall; when the people of Montana took the buying and selling of men in the legislature as part of the game, all in the day’s work. But Montana has caught the reform spirit that has been sweeping over the rest of the country, and she is also getting pretty sick of corporation power. Now, sir, not only have I a clear title to this ranch, but I’ve staked off the entire hill and applied for patents. If Amalgamated freezes me out of Anaconda and Great Falls, I’ll promote a company and put up a plant of my own. With nearly a million dollars in sight besides what I’ve taken out, you can figure, yourself, how much trouble I’d have in New York getting all the money I wanted. Amalgamated knows that, and my ore will continue to be smelted in Anaconda. Of course if I were within a mile or so of Butte I might be in some danger. They’d bore through and then claim that my ore vein apexed in one of their properties. But I’m too far away for that.”

Gregory saw the other man’s eyes flash wide open before they were hastily lowered. Mr. Robinson regarded the point of his cigar.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “That’s all very true. Luck is with you in a measure, but—well, take my advice and don’t fight Amalgamated. They have in their employ some of the most resourceful brains in the country—that are always on the job. Heinze taught them a lesson they’ll never forget.”

“Let’s drop the subject.” Gregory rose and opened a cupboard. “Have something?”

He poured whiskey into two glasses. The men smiled as they drank, Gregory sardonically, Mr. Robinson ruefully but with thoughtful eyes. He had what Ida called the quick-rich face, large and round and fat, and it was an admirable mask.

“Like to see the mine?” asked Gregory.

“Why, yes—do you mean it?”

“Why not? If it had any secrets your spies would have turned them over before this. Glad to show it to you.”

They went to the shafthead and descended in one of the buckets.

“How far down have you gone?” asked Mr. Robinson, with an air of polite interest.

“We found chalcopyrite at one hundred and ten feet, after a narrow vein leading from the chamber near the surface, and are stoping.”

As they left the bucket they were greeted by the cheerful rhythmical sound of hammers on the drills, and by the light of the miners’ candles they saw the men working at different points of the dark chamber, two on a scaffolding above.

“Great waste of labor,” said Gregory. “I shall install a compressor before long as well as electric lighting. Of course it is only the beginning of a mine.”

He saw the ambassador from Amalgamated smile, and turned on his heel. “They’ll be loading the holes in a minute,” he said. “And I’d like to show you the upper chamber.”

When they reached the surface Mr. Robinson declined to go down into the excavation, but stood on the edge watching the busy hive below. “Great sight,” he said admiringly. “How deep have you gone?”

“About seventy-eight feet.”

“And the end not in sight!”

“Not yet, but of course it’s only a chamber.”

“You’ve taken out close on half a million here alone.”

“Pretty near. What the devil made you suppose I’d take a paltry hundred thousand for the hill?”

“Oh, just to avoid trouble. You have the reputation of being a very clever man.”

“Thanks. It’s cold standing round. Wouldn’t you like to take a walk? How’d you like to see the Primo Mine?”

As Gregory, who was watching him intently, anticipated, the man’s face lit up. “I should like it!” he said definitely. “I hear that they too have struck chalcopyrite. Lost their gold vein.”

“They’re nosing after it in another direction. When the lease is up I shall consolidate with the Blakes.”

“Quite natural. Of course it’s the same vein?—the chalcopyrite, I mean.”

“Unquestionably. And it apexes in my property.”

“Are you so sure of that?”

“Not a doubt in the world. I struck the top of the vein twelve feet below the surface. But it will never go to the courts.”

“Of course not.”

Gregory, who looked remote, almost blank, lost not an intonation of the other man’s voice, nor a flickering gleam in his cunning eyes. His own head was a little on one side, which, had Mr. Robinson had the good fortune to know him better, would have warned him that the young man for whom he had conceived a certain respect was thinking hard and to some purpose.

Douglas, who had a personal liking for his neighbor, unaware that he had been the chief instrument in the upsetting of skillful plans for untold wealth, readily gave permission to visit the mine as soon as the smoke from a recent blast would permit. Gregory and Mr. Robinson walked about to keep warm, the former pointing out the probability of a faulted ore vein under the aspens, and enlarging upon the great fortune bound to be Mrs. Blake’s in any case. Then as the man merely remarked, “Yes, charming woman, Mrs. Blake; thought the night of the Prom she was one of the prettiest women I ever saw. No dead easy game there”; Gregory refrained from kicking him and said innocently.

“Good thing the law compels creditors to present their claims within a limited time, or Amalgamated might grab this mine and bore through to my hill. I understand Judge Stratton was heavily in debt to the Anaconda Company when he died.”

Mr. Robinson’s face turned a deep brick-red, and he shot a piercing glance into the narrow noncommittal eyes opposite.

“Of course—it’s too late for that, but—Oh, well——” He broke off abruptly and walked toward the shaft as Osborne beckoned. Gregory stood a moment, his head bent forward. He had experienced the sensation of coming into contact with an electrical wave. But he was smiling pleasantly as he joined his guest at the shaft house.

After the visit to the mine, during which he amiably pointed out the dip of the vein toward his own property, and Mr. Robinson succumbed to the charm which never missed fire when Gregory chose to exert it, they walked back to the ranch, where a team awaited the ambassador at the foot of the hill.

“I’ve had quite a delightful visit,” began Mr. Robinson, when Gregory interrupted:

“I’ve no intention of letting you go. You must have supper at the farm and meet Oakley. I’ll send off the rig and drive you in myself——”

“Oh, I couldn’t think of troubling you——” Robinson, red again, stood in almost agitated embarrassment.

“No train to Butte till nine-thirty. You don’t want to spend four hours in Pony?”

“The fact is——” But whatever he had on his mind died on his lips. He looked sharply into the bland smiling eyes opposite, and concluded abruptly, “All right. Many thanks. Glad of the chance to know you better.”

He paid off the driver of the team and they walked toward the ranch house, Gregory commenting on Oakley’s genius for dry farming, and expatiating upon the excellence of the crops. Mining was not mentioned again during the evening and the lawyer enjoyed an excellent supper.

Gregory drove him to Pony, and clung to him so closely that he had no opportunity to visit the telegraph office or a telephone booth. They shook hands cordially as the train moved off. When it was out of sight Gregory sent a telegram to Mark telling him to take the first train next morning for Virginia City and meet him in the Court House. He took his car to a garage and spent the night in Pony. On the following morning at nine o’clock he walked into the Tax Collector’s office at the County Seat.

XXV

THE County Treasurer, who had just come in, looked blank for a moment, then greeted his visitor with effusive cordiality.

“Always glad to see you, Mr. Compton. It does a poor clerk’s heart good just to look at a man who’s such a favourite of fortune. Sit down, sir.”

“I will. I’ve a good deal to say.”

“Staked off the rest of your ranch? It’ll be some little time yet before you get those patents through you’ve applied for already——”

“What do the taxes foot up on the Oro Fino Primo Mine?”

“Ah—What?” The man’s face turned scarlet, then white. He was a young man, clerically able, but otherwise insignificant. “Why——” Then he became voluble.

“The Primo mine, over there near your place? It’s a new claim, isn’t it? Never heard of it before those fellows from New York sank a shaft and struck it rich. Why should there be any taxes before the regular——”

“You know as well as I do that Judge Stratton patented that mine and did the necessary amount of development work, then found it salted and abandoned it. That was twenty-eight years ago. He forgot it, and so, apparently, did this office. It was regarded as an abandoned prospect hole, if anyone thought about it at all. I haven’t discussed the matter with Mr. Blake, but assume that he’s merely been waiting for his bill. Now, for reasons of my own, I’ve telegraphed him to meet me here this morning, but in case he can’t come I’m prepared to pay the amount myself. How much?” and he took out his checque book.

The treasurer looked as if the cane seat of his chair had turned to hot coals. “Really—that is a large order, Mr. Compton. Twenty-eight years. It will take time to go over the records.”

“I’m prepared to wait all day if necessary.”

“But why this haste?”

“I have my reasons. They don’t concern you in the least. Do they?”

“Why—no—but I am very busy——”

“Then put someone else on the job. I assume that the county is not averse to raking in a tidy little sum in a hurry.”

“Really——”

Gregory leaned back in his chair and smiled pleasantly.

“You had a telephone from Mr. John Robinson this morning.”

This time the man started visibly, but he made an effort to control himself. “I have just come in——”

“He telephoned to you last night, did he not? What did he offer you to permit him to pay those taxes today?”

“I will not be insulted, sir.” The man’s voice was almost a scream. He heartily wished he had been in training a few years longer, a graduate of the famous Heinze-Amalgamated orgy of corruption, or of the Clark-Daly epoch, when nearly every man in office had been bribed or hoped to be. “I never heard of Mr. Robinson!”

“Of course he reminded you that as the taxes are long delinquent the county has the right to put the property up at public auction, and that in any case Mrs. Blake would hardly be given the usual year in which to redeem it. But why auction when the money is ready to be paid over at once? How much did he offer you?”

“I repeat——”