‘They act like madmen,’ she whispered.  ’They run about as if everything had to be done in a minute.’

’Between them the crowd down there don’t own, I’d say, fifty dollars.  Each one is figuring that he has his chance to be a millionaire to-morrow.  And they know that more men are coming.  That’s the way men think when they’re in the gold rush.  Look, there come some more!’

This time there were three men.  They broke into a run when they heard voices; perhaps they had hoped to be first.  Down into the bed of the gulch they plunged; one of them slipped and rolled and cursed; men laughed, and with the laughter dying in their throats broke off to yell a warning to some one to keep his feet off a claim already staked out.  Within an hour after the return of Bettins there were a score of men on the spot; again and again rose sharp words as every man, alert to protect his own interests, was ready for a quarrel.  They dragged stones to mark their boundaries; they cut and hammered stakes, they left their chosen sites now and then and altered their first judgments and restaked somewhere else.  They swarmed up the banks of the gulch on both sides, they hastened back and forth, they staked everywhere.  As the time passed more and more came plunging into the orgy of gold until at last the night was never quiet.  Harsh words passed and once blows were struck and a man went down and lay still.  Another time there was the report of a gun and a boom of many voices commanding order and that quarrels be taken to a safe distance and out of the way of busy men.

‘It’s dreadful,’ whispered Helen.  ‘They’re like wild animals.’

‘It’s just the gold fever,’ he returned.  ’Poor devils! they are drunk with their visions.’

But Helen wondered if they were capable of visions.  Down in the shadow-filled sink they were to her imagination like so many swine plunging into a monster trough.  When Alan suggested, ’We’ve seen, and now maybe we had better be going,’ she rose without a word or backward glance and went with him.  But Howard, looking over his shoulder, saw still other men coming.  He himself began to wonder whence they had come:  by now, it seemed to him, both Big Run and San Ramon must have emptied themselves like bags of wheat slashed with a knife.

They walked swiftly until the din of the gold-seekers was lost to their ears.  Then slowly they strolled on, silence enwrapping them, Helen’s eyes wandering away to the glory of the stars, Howard’s contented with the girl’s face.  After a while Helen, feeling the intentness of his look, turned toward him with a strange little smile which came and went fleetingly.  She stopped a moment, still looking at him.

‘Your country has done something to me,’ she said thoughtfully, ’even though I have been out here only a few weeks.  For one thing, when I first came I thought that I knew all about men and that they were pretty much all alike.  I am finding out that they are not at all alike and that I don’t understand them.’