They came upon a man in the bend of the creek, white of skin and blue of eye, and for a moment Li Wan saw the other man in the snow.  But she saw dimly, for she was weak and tired from what she had undergone.  Still, she looked at him curiously, and stopped with Canim to watch him at his work.  He was washing gravel in a large pan, with a circular, tilting movement; and as they looked, giving a deft flirt, he flashed up the yellow gold in a broad streak across the bottom of the pan.

“Very rich, this creek,” Canim told her, as they went on.  “Sometime I will find such a creek, and then I shall be a big man.”

Cabins and men grew more plentiful, till they came to where the main portion of the creek was spread out before them.  It was the scene of a vast devastation.  Everywhere the earth was torn and rent as though by a Titan’s struggles.  Where there were no upthrown mounds of gravel, great holes and trenches yawned, and chasms where the thick rime of the earth had been peeled to bed-rock.  There was no worn channel for the creek, and its waters, dammed up, diverted, flying through the air on giddy flumes, trickling into sinks and low places, and raised by huge water-wheels, were used and used again a thousand times.  The hills had been stripped of their trees, and their raw sides gored and perforated by great timber-slides and prospect holes.  And over all, like a monstrous race of ants, was flung an army of men—­mud-covered, dirty, dishevelled men, who crawled in and out of the holes of their digging, crept like big bugs along the flumes, and toiled and sweated at the gravel-heaps which they kept in constant unrest—­men, as far as the eye could see, even to the rims of the hilltops, digging, tearing, and scouring the face of nature.

Li Wan was appalled at the tremendous upheaval.  “Truly, these men are mad,” she said to Canim.

“Small wonder.  The gold they dig after is a great thing,” he replied.  “It is the greatest thing in the world.”

For hours they threaded the chaos of greed, Canim eagerly intent, Li Wan weak and listless.  She knew she had been on the verge of disclosure, and she felt that she was still on the verge of disclosure, but the nervous strain she had undergone had tired her, and she passively waited for the thing, she knew not what, to happen.  From every hand her senses snatched up and conveyed to her innumerable impressions, each of which became a dull excitation to her jaded imagination.  Somewhere within her, responsive notes were answering to the things without, forgotten and undreamed-of correspondences were being renewed; and she was aware of it in an incurious way, and her soul was troubled, but she was not equal to the mental exultation necessary to transmute and understand.  So she plodded wearily on at the heels of her lord, content to wait for that which she knew, somewhere, somehow, must happen.

After undergoing the mad bondage of man, the creek finally returned to its ancient ways, all soiled and smirched from its toil, and coiled lazily among the broad flats and timbered spaces where the valley widened to its mouth.  Here the “pay” ran out, and men were loth to loiter with the lure yet beyond.  And here, as Li Wan paused to prod Olo with her staff, she heard the mellow silver of a woman’s laughter.