mineral unworth, contained two or three skeleton trees (one of which had a stout lateral branch from which a weather-wasted rope still significantly dangled), half a hundred gravelly mounds, a score of rude headboards displaying the literary peculiarities above mentioned and a struggling colony of prickly pears.  Altogether, God’s Location, as with characteristic reverence it had been called, could justly boast of an indubitably superior quality of desolation.  It was in the most thickly settled part of this interesting demesne that Mr. Jefferson Doman staked off his claim.  If in the prosecution of his design he should deem it expedient to remove any of the dead they would have the right to be suitably reinterred.

III

This Mr. Jefferson Doman was from Elizabethtown, New Jersey, where six years before he had left his heart in the keeping of a golden-haired, demure-mannered young woman named Mary Matthews, as collateral security for his return to claim her hand.

“I just know you’ll never get back alive—­you never do succeed in anything,” was the remark which illustrated Miss Matthews’s notion of what constituted success and, inferentially, her view of the nature of encouragement.  She added:  “If you don’t I’ll go to California too.  I can put the coins in little bags as you dig them out.”

This characteristically feminine theory of auriferous deposits did not commend itself to the masculine intelligence:  it was Mr. Doman’s belief that gold was found in a liquid state.  He deprecated her intent with considerable enthusiasm, suppressed her sobs with a light hand upon her mouth, laughed in her eyes as he kissed away her tears, and with a cheerful “Ta-ta” went to California to labor for her through the long, loveless years, with a strong heart, an alert hope and a steadfast fidelity that never for a moment forgot what it was about.  In the mean time, Miss Matthews had granted a monopoly of her humble talent for sacking up coins to Mr. Jo.  Seeman, of New York, gambler, by whom it was better appreciated than her commanding genius for unsacking and bestowing them upon his local rivals.  Of this latter aptitude, indeed, he manifested his disapproval by an act which secured him the position of clerk of the laundry in the State prison, and for her the sobriquet of “Split-faced Moll.”  At about this time she wrote to Mr. Doman a touching letter of renunciation, inclosing her photograph to prove that she had no longer had a right to indulge the dream of becoming Mrs. Doman, and recounting so graphically her fall from a horse that the staid “plug” upon which Mr. Doman had ridden into Red Dog to get the letter made vicarious atonement under the spur all the way back to camp.  The letter failed in a signal way to accomplish its object; the fidelity which had before been to Mr. Doman a matter of love and duty was thenceforth a matter of honor also; and the photograph, showing the once pretty face sadly