Rosamund, looking into the upturned face, nodded. There was a sudden pricking of tears under her eyelids, an unexpected quivering of her lips. She bent down and laid her cheek against her sister’s, and in the dim room they clung together for a silent moment, one in the first flush of her woman’s happiness, the other in the dawning realization of her desertion. CHAPTER X THE QUICKENING CURRENT The last quarter of 1873 was for California and Nevada a period of steadily augmenting excitement. The rumor of new strikes in the California and Con. Virginia grew with each week, seizing upon the minds of men, shaking them from the lethargy of their disbelief, arresting them in the plodding ways of work by the temptation of riches, in vast quantities, easily made, open to the hands of all who dared. Reports from Virginia by wire, by letter, by word of mouth poured into San Francisco. The news that a southeast drift had run into a rich ore-body in the California and Con. Virginia was two weeks later supplemented by a rumor that a chamber had been cut in the ledge, the ore-surface assaying from ninety-three to six hundred and thirty-two dollars per ton. The male population of the city surged back and forth across the mountains, seized with the fever for gold. The wild days of mining speculation were not yet fully inaugurated, but with the increasing discoveries shares in all the properties near the new bonanzas began to rise, and the world once more began to buy. From across the mountains truth and rumor flowed in ever-accelerating waves to San Francisco, and stocks began to leap as they had done in the Crown Point and Belcher days. In the middle of this outer ring of excitement the little group of the Colonel and his friends was shaken by tumults of its own creating. The great wheel outside spun round with fury while the little wheel inside flew with an equal speed. It seemed as if the fever of life around them was communicating itself to them, making their blood flow quicker, their pulses throb harder, lifting them up to planes where the air was charged with dynamic forces, and electric vibrations hummed along the serene currents of life.