“Can you imagine that sliding volume of water being halted in all its hurry and made to stop running to the gulf; thwarted in its whole purpose?” she asked dreamily. “I’ve watched it all my life. Sometimes it’s savage and boils along, with driftwood and débris of all kinds--I saw it at Needles, once, in flood time. It was awful. Then to think how three men have lived beside it and planned and worked for years and years, to stop all that tremendous movement and pen it up in the hills and--it seems to me that it’s like life. It goes hurrying along, too, for years and years, and its power is devastating and awful, sometimes. And then--after all, it’s so easy to stop it.” “Yes,” said Rawley, his thoughts forced back again to things he would like to forget. “It’s easy to stop it. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “A man standing so close to me our shoulders rubbed was stopped in the middle of a sentence. We were talking. I asked him something about the mine. He was telling me. A cable broke, and the end of it snapped our way and caught him in the head. Life stopped right there, so far as he was concerned. He wasn’t given time to finish what he was saying.” Nevada was staring at him, her lips parted, the easy flow of her thoughts halted by the horror of the picture he had drawn with a few quiet words. So few words--spoken so quietly, she thought fleetingly. “I--didn’t know--right beside you! It might have--Weren’t you hurt?” Rawley lifted a hand to his cheek, where a fine, white line was drawn. “The tip of one strand flicked me there,” he said. “Made a nasty gash.” The pallor in Nevada’s face deepened. She shivered as if a sudden chill had struck her skin. “Well,” said Rawley, after a further five minutes of staring at the river. “I’ll be getting back. Tell Peter I’ll be down again. Or if he can take the time, have him come up, will you?” “Why don’t you call him father?” Nevada asked him. “You aren’t ashamed of him, are you?” Rawley looked at her, the truth on the tip of his tongue. But he closed his lips a bit more firmly, smiled down at her and shook his head. “Peter and I understand each other,” he told her enigmatically and went away. He quite agreed with Nevada. Even in times of peace, life could almost be called devastating. CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE THE TRUTH ABOUT RICHES “To-morrow,” said Johnny Buffalo, with a transparent air of triumph, “we will go to the cleft in the rocks, by the path which no man knoweth, and you shall go down into the deep pit and find the gold.” “What’s that?” Rawley looked up from crowding tobacco into his pipe after a most satisfying supper. “You found it, did you?”