In winter time the doctor sat near the fireplace, writing by the candlelight on his great book. She was in the shadow, looking at him with tenderness, smiling wearily at the eager quivering of his chin, and rocking gently back and forth. The little girl played demurely on the floor within the circle of firelight, her curls falling down on her forehead. She piled up her blocks, and occasionally, as one would fall, she would look up in deprecation of her mother's hush. The golden heads of the mother and child were like sunshine before the dark walls of the cabin. Against them the firelight gleamed. Outside, the thin, light snow drifted fitfully by the pane. The doctor wrote. The woman watched in patience. The child played. As spring came on, the doctor got out into the hills again. One day he came back and found the woman murdered and the child gone. The cabin was ransacked from one end to the other, but no attempt had been made to fire it. The doctor put his specimen bags methodically in their places, and then sat down by his dead wife. At evening some passing miners found him there holding her hand. With some difficulty, and by the exercise of a gentle force, they persuaded him to rise, after which they tenderly laid the body on a couch, concealing as best they might the red tonsure where the scalp had been. They set the cabin in order and cooked supper from the provisions in their wagon. The doctor ate and drank in silence, making no sign when the men spoke to him. After supper he went outside and began to arrange his specimens. When darkness fell he came in, stood undecided for a moment, and then lay down on a bear-skin, Jim's gift, and slept. The men looked at one another in a puzzled way, conversing in low tones. Soon they too rolled themselves up and went to sleep on the floor. Early in the morning Jim Buckley came down the gulch with part of a deer. The men told him the news hurriedly, between mouthfuls of coffee. Jim looked at the dead woman with a hardening of the mouth and a softening of the eyes; then he went out and for the first time took the doctor's hand. When they had finished breakfast, the men made a rough bier of willow branches plaited, on which they gently laid the body. Two went down to the soft earth by the creek bottom and began to dig. The others followed with their burden, which they laid beside the growing excavation, and then stood with bared heads, waiting for the diggers. The doctor would not come. After a little persuasion they left him sitting on the ground, leaning against the logs of the cabin, looking out over the bluffs of the Cheyenne to the east. The men in the trench worked rapidly and skilfully, one loosening the gravel with his pick, the other shovelling it out on the grass. Suddenly the latter stopped in the act of tossing a shovelful. He pushed his stubby forefinger in among the gravel for a moment and drew out an irregular bit of metal. It was gold.