"MONTE CRISTO WOULD ENJOY THIS!"

"The way this gulch is washed, I don't know whether I can show you anything or not," Bill explained worriedly, preparing for a flat failure of his little plan. "That was next thing to a cloud-burst last night, Doris—and I'll own now that I was uneasy last night when you said you had left your horses down the gulch. But then, I knew you wouldn't tie them in the bottom where they might get drowned out."

"Well, I hope not," Doris retorted with some asperity. No desert-bred girl likes to be thought ignorant of desert hazards. "You'll have to make this short, you know. They'll expect me home early to-day. I don't see why you can't go. Now you've staked yourself to the luxury of a mucker, you can leave him in charge, I should think. Do you really think you've struck anything, Bill?"

"You wait. If my location cut isn't filled in, I can show you in ten minutes. And—if it's good, you're in on it. I located a claim on the same ledge in your name."

"You did?" Doris looked up at him quickly, but she could see only Bill's left cheek as he swung his face away from her. "Why, why for me, particularly? I couldn't develop it—dad wouldn't let me. You ought to keep your claims for yourself, Bill. You—you'd give away your head, if you could get it off!"

"I might throw in the rest of me," Bill hinted meaningly, his heart pounding like a single-jack in a miners' contest. He stole a glance at her from the corner of his eye and was scared and a bit happy, too, at the flush on her cheek.

"Well, fortunately for you——" Doris bit her lip and left the sentence unfinished. She liked Bill Dale, but—there would always be unfinished sentences concerning her regard for him. A prospector is, paradoxically, not a good prospect for a girl. Doris had seen the poor, withered wives of miners who were forever just on the eve of striking something rich.

Walking beside Bill, she thought of the wistful eyes and the draggled, cheap clothes of certain women she had met. Some of them even wore overalls and helped dig. Bill had been prospecting ever since she first met him at a dance in Goldfield. He had talked optimistically of his prospects then. He would always talk in the same vein. Always just going to strike rich ore,—never actually getting more than a bare living; if one could call grub and a tent a living.

"Fortunately for me—what?" Bill was in the mood to bring about a crisis of some kind between them. He considered that he had gone too far now to retreat.

"Fortunately for you, your friends have more regard for you than you have for yourself," Doris amended glibly. "Is it much farther, Bill? Because I really must——"

"It's just up around this first turn." Bill's face sobered a bit. After all, Doris didn't seem to care much, one way or the other. She didn't seem very enthusiastic over her claim; didn't she know he would take care of the development work for her—at least the assessment work?

"If a slide hasn't covered it up," he said heavily. "I wanted to show you what I—what I've got. Then——"

"Well, you know I'm no expert, Bill," Doris reminded him lightly. "I can tell silver—when it's in spoons. And gold is jewelry——"

Bill caught her arm, stopping her perforce. His grip left marks in her soft flesh. She looked at him, startled, and paled before the fixed stare in his eyes. He lifted a shaking finger and pointed.

Bill's cut in the side of the gulch had not been filled by any slide of the soft gravel higher up the slope. Instead it stood there naked, deep, clean as a dog's tooth. Even from where they stood the metal gleamed yellow in the ten-inch vein of quartz laid bare to the sunlight.

Slowly, almost reverently, Bill went forward, still holding the girl's arm in his strong, unconsciously painful grip. He led her into the cut, stooped and broke off a point of the vein with his fingers where his last shot had seamed the quartz. He laid the gold-flecked piece in her hand. He looked at her standing there so close with the symbol of a great fortune in her hand,—the symbol too of his worshipful love.

"Monte Cristo would enjoy this," he said and laughed unsteadily. "It's—I found it—it's yours—if you'll take me along with it. I couldn't—I had to strike something before I could dare——"

"Is—is it—gold?" Doris whispered it awesomely. Looking up wide-eyed into his face. "Oh—Bill!"

Bill took her in his arms, felt her yield, saw her head tilt back against his shoulder. He drew a deep breath that was like a sob, and bent and kissed her hair.

Doris was looking from the gold-specked quartz in her hand to the gold-specked ridge lying naked to the sky. Her eyes were big and deep, like the blue of the sky.

"Do you love me, Doris?" Bill dared to lean and speak his one absorbing hunger, his lips close to her ear.

"Yes—Oh, Bill, it doesn't seem possible! I—I can't realize it. Can you? Doris was staring still at the gold.

"It's like a dream come true—a thousand times better than I'd ever dare to dream it." Bill was looking at the way the sunlight turned her brown hair to burnished copper, strand by strand. His voice broke. He laid his cheek against the copper shine. "You love me! God, I was always scared to dream you ever would!"

Doris stirred in his arms. She was lifting the piece of ore, turning it this way and that, watching it shine in the sun and in the shade alike. That was the test—pyrites wouldn't shine in the shade. It was gold, absolutely it must be gold!

"Oh, Bill, aren't you—excited?" She had turned so that she could look into his face. "It's an awfully rich strike, isn't it?"

"Why—yes, I suppose it is." Bill looked briefly at the vein. "Yes, it's the richest stuff I ever saw in the ground. But it doesn't mean anything to me, Doris, alongside your—love." He whispered the last word shyly against her cheek. "You'll marry me right away, won't you, Doris? I've—wanted you so long; ever since that first time I met you. I've thought and dreamed about you—but it didn't seem possible you could ever care. Only, I thought if I made a real stake, and you did like me well enough, I could give you everything in the world you wanted. It's as you say: I can't realize it yet. I—wish you'd say it again; just once more. Do you—care?"

For answer Doris smiled up at him brilliantly. "You great, big silly," she said softly.

Bill kissed her lips and wondered if a man could bear greater joy than was his. Not to have just weary, wishful dreams of her; to have Doris herself, her love, her willingness to trust herself to him. He felt humbled, ashamed of every little human, masculine fault. In one sweeping, swift repentance as he stood there, he resolved to attain perfection for her sake—or as near to perfection as a man may approach.

"You know, daddy and mother will have to be asked before I can—promise absolutely," she reminded him prudently. "So let's not talk about it any more just now, Bill."

"Why, I—I couldn't talk about it," Bill said slowly. "Some things go too deep. You just can't find any words; or I can't. I'll just have to prove as I go along—what it means to me."

"Just think, Bill! We could go to California, couldn't we?" Doris suggested inconsistently. "Talk about dreams—I've dreamed of the ocean, and orange groves, and beautiful things, until sometimes I've nearly gone crazy. Bill, I almost hate the desert. It's beautiful, and of course I know it by heart and would probably miss it if I never saw it again; but all my life I've been hungry for California."

"You're kind of glad I found the big strike, aren't you?" Bill smiled down at her, his eyes worshipful. "I guess we can go to California, all right. We could go to the South Pole, if we wanted to badly enough. Anywhere in the world you say, Doris. You and I together have four claims along this contact—as near as I could judge from surface indications. That ought to bring your dreams to life, don't you think?" Then he sobered. "But it's going to take a little time, at that. We've got to dig it out, you know. Unless," he added dubiously, "I sold out for just what I could get. That would be quick money, but it wouldn't be enough to let us play the rest of our lives. I'd have to take some of it and get into some business or other. And that would tie us down to one spot more or less."

Doris shook her head at that. "No, we mustn't sell out. You remember what Mr. Rayfield said at the breakfast table, don't you? He certainly does know what he's talking about, and I know he'd be glad to advise—us." The last word she spoke with an adorable hesitation which registered an extra beat in Bill's pulse. "He's a government man, so of course you can trust him. I think we ought to show this vein to him, and let him tell us just what to do. His talk about corporations was awfully sensible, Bill."

"I don't know, Doris." Bill's eyes became shadowed with an unhappy memory. "I'm kind of scared of corporations. One of them broke my dad. He found a mine—not so good as this by a long way, but still pretty good—and some crooks incorporated it for him. When they got through with him, he had a bunch of stock and no mine. No money, either. It got him. He lived about two years after that, and he spent all his time cursing corporations. I don't know, Doris, but it kind of left me with a chill whenever I hear the word."

"Well, you say yourself that they were crooks. Mr. Rayfield and Mr. Emmett may have landed those very men in the penitentiary. "You've got nerves, Bill. I never would have suspected it."

"Maybe there's a good deal about me you've never suspected," Bill hinted warily,—and almost told her about the saxophone. But he didn't. His courage was too new and timid, the mine was too wonderful, and the love of Doris too unbelievable.

"One thing I'd better do," he said, dragging his mind back to the practical, "and that is to cover up this vein before some one goes to 'high-grading' on us. Tommy says Al Freeman's a thief around mines."

He pulled shovel and pick from under a ridge of washed gravel and began artfully filling the cut so that it looked as if the dirt had caved in on the side where the vein had been exposed. There was nothing crude in Bill's work. When he had finished, a stranger would have sworn that the earth, gravel and rocks had rattled down from above. Doris kept watch for him, and mourned openly because all that beautiful ore must be buried out of sight. It seemed to her almost a sacrilege.

"That's all right," Bill comforted her, standing with his arm around her shoulders while he contemplated his camouflage. "It can't run away or spoil, you know. That vein would be enough to tempt any man whose honesty didn't reach to the middle of his bones. Now you go on up the gulch while I brush out our tracks around this cut. There's a little vein up in the next location hole that's just a stringer—but it's fairly rich, and will do to show. We'll go up there, and I'll do a little digging and get some samples. And then, if you want me to put it up to the government men, Doris, I'll do it. But I'll do it on the strength of what shows up in Parowan Number Two—and we'll just keep this Number One vein a secret between us. Shall we?"

"Yes-s, if you let me tell daddy and mother," Doris assented. "I don't believe I could keep it a secret from them, Bill."

"We'll tell them, sure. I'll leave Tommy in charge of camp and go over with you to the ranch. I'd like to ask your dad what he thinks of it before I talk to the government men."

"Well, I think that's a good plan. They'll all believe, of course, that you're going over to see about that water tunnel. You can't afford to dig tunnels for dad, now——" she gave his arm an ecstatic squeeze "——but they won't know that. Oh, I think it's just dandy to have to be secret about it!"

"Anyway, it's a darn sight safer," Bill told her laconically, and led the way to Number Two.