Almost a double score of years had gone since the place knew human voice or human movement, save when some lone prospector passed along the brush-grown street that crept upward with the cañon’s slope. The dead town’s very stillness and desolation were full of charm, albeit tempered with that sadness a ruin always has for the beholder. For through the empty doorways came the whisperings of those who were gone; and looking through the sashless windows as you rode by, you saw wraithlike figures pass and repass within. It might have been only the wind’s breath as it rustled the dark leaves of branches overhanging the crumbling walls, and the ghosts, mayhap, were but the waving boughs which tremulously moved over the gray adobes; but when you were there--in that stillness and amid all that mystery--you felt it was true. You hushed your quickening breath to listen for the breath of some other. You moved through the silence with wide-lidded eyes looking for--you knew not what. You felt yourself out of place there--an alien. Only the lizards on the decaying walls, and the little brown birds that pecked at berries growing on the bushes along the creek, and the cottontails that scurried away to hide in the brush, seemed to have honest claim there. On a level with the dead camp’s one street, the short tunnel of the Spencer mine ran into the cliff which pushed itself forward from the cañon’s general contour--the mouth itself being all but hidden by the falling walls of what had once been an adobe dwelling, its rear wall but a few feet from the limestone bluffs. To it, old Zeke brought Sherwood and showed him the tunnel below and the croppings of white quartz on the cliff top. It looked barren and worthless; but an assay certificate, in which the values were marked in four figures, held before Sherwood’s astonished eyes, sent his hopes up to fever mark, and left him eager to begin the work whereby he might reach the precious stuff hidden well away within the dull-colored bluffs. If the croppings promised such wealth, what might not the mine itself yield when he extended the tunnel, and had tapped the ledge at a greater depth? He felt his heart beating the faster for his dreams. A fortune! His, and--hers! All that was needed to bring it about were pick strokes, powder and patience. It all seemed very simple to Hume Sherwood. Without doubt he was a “tenderfoot.” So the Summer found him putting every pulse-throb into his labor. Was it not for her that he wanted it? For what other end was he working, than to win the maid who had come into this land of enchantment? To him, it was as Paradise--these great broad levels of alkali, and sand (blotches of white on a blur of gray) and the sagebrush and greasewood-covered foothills that lay, fold upon fold, against the base of grim mountains--prickly with splintered and uncovered rocks.