The young Allens began their new life by plunging themselves still deeper in debt. Their honeymoon was very short. They spent it on Long Island Sound in a yacht which Wilmot borrowed over the telephone, just before they left Clovelly to be married. On the sixth day they went West. In Salt Lake City they foregathered with a mining engineer to whom Wilmot had secured letters. This one fell in love with Barbara, closed his office and went with them into the hills for ten days. They came out of the hills with brown faces and sparkling eyes. The engineer opened his office and dictated his report of their mines to his stenographer. During this work of enthusiasm he occasionally sighed, and the stenographer knit her brows. "Now then," said the engineer to Wilmot and Barbara, "if my name is any good in New York, you can raise all the money you need on that document. If you can't, telegraph, and I can raise it here." "But," said Barbara, growing very practical, "if the money can be raised here, why blow in two car-fares _and_ a drawing-room from here to New York and back?" [Illustration: The engineer made generous terms across the dinner-table] "Why," the engineer stammered a little, "I thought you'd have lots and lots of friends that you'd want to let in on the ground floor. But if you haven't, and if my money is as good as another's--you see, it's a grand property--I'm not above longing for an interest in it myself." "I can't deny," said Wilmot, who had been worrying himself dreadfully about finding the means, "that this looks like easy money to me." The engineer made generous terms across the dinner-table, and the young Allens borrowed his money from him. "I suppose," said the engineer hopefully, "that you'll run out from time to time to see how things are getting on?" "Run out?" exclaimed Barbara; "we are going to live with the proposition until it goes through or under. Aren't we, Wilmot?" "I hoped you'd feel that way about it, Barbs." "You _knew_ I would." At first they lived in a tent, and then in a series of large wooden boxes that they called first "The House" and then "Home." Machinery began to come into the camp in the wake of long strings of mules walking two and two. Upon the report of their special consulting engineer the nearest transcontinental railroad began to lay metals across the desert, to the mines. One day came strangers with picks and shovels, and the next day came more. And these began to scratch among the sage-brush and to explode sticks of dynamite against the faces of hills. Claims were staked; shanties built; a hotel with saloon attached, all of shining tin and tar paper, arose in the night. The first thing Barbara knew Wilmot began to talk of a stretch of sage-brush as Main Street. And the same day she heard a man with red beard speak of the little town as "Allen."