Today Ballarat is a ghost town and soon every trace of it will be gone. Roofless walls lift like prayerful arms to gods that are deaf. In the late afternoon when the shadows of the Argus Range have crept across the valley, a few old timers come out of leaning dobes and stand bareheaded to look about. The afterglow of a sun is upon the peaks and the afterglow of dreams in their hearts. They people the empty streets with men long dead, some in unmarked graves in the little cemetery on the flat just beyond the town. Some on the trails, God only knows where. These dead they see pass in and out of the old saloons. These dead they hear again. Glasses tinkle, slippered feet dance again. Tomorrow? Their pale eyes lift to the canyons and though dimmed a little, they see one hundred billion dollars. What of Shoshone? It remains with changes of course. The shanties hauled from Greenwater have been hauled somewhere else. No longer do I step from my car as I have so often and call to those on the bench. “Move over, fellows” and hear their familiar greeting: “Where the hell _you_ been?” Instead, I drive to an air conditioned cabin and stroll back to the former site of the bench, so long the social center. There I see a sign over a door which reads, “Crowbar” and I enter a dreamy cavern with dimmed, rosy lights, hear the music of ice against glass and refuse to believe the startling sight of an honest-to-goodness old timer tending bar in a clean white shirt. Likewise I balk at the white lines I walk between as I cross the asphalt road to the store. But above Shoshone the same blue skies stretch without end over a world apart, and under them are the same uncrowded trails; the same far horizons for the vagabond’s foot and the peace “which passeth all understanding.” INDEX A Amargosa River, 96 American Potash and Chemical Co., 33 Archilette Spring, 95 Augerreberry, Pete, 58