The Girl’s face illumined with a great joy.  She did not stop now to dissipate the tears which she saw rolling down Sonora’s face, as was her wont when any of the boys were grieved or distressed, but fairly flew out of the cabin, calling half-frantically, half-ecstatically: 

“Dick!  Dick!  You’re free!  You’re free!  You’re free . . .!”

The minutes passed and still the miners did not move.  They stood with an air of solemnity gazing silently at one another.  Only too well did they realise what was happening to them.  They were inconsolable.  Presently, Sonora, all in a heap on a bench, took out some tobacco and began to chew it as fast as his mouth would let him; Happy, going over to the teacher’s desk, picked up the bunch of berries which he had presented her at the opening of the school session and began to fondle them; while Trinidad, too overcome to speak, stood leaning against the door, gazing sadly in the direction that the Girl had taken.  As for Rance, after calling to Nick to bring him a drink, he quietly brought out a pack of cards from his pocket and, seemingly, became absorbed in a game of solitaire.

A little while later, his eyes still red from weeping, Nick remarked: 

“The Polka won’t never be the same, boys—­the Girl’s gone.”

XVIII.

The soft and velvety blackness of night was giving place to a pearly grey, and the feathery streaks of a trembling dawn were shooting heavenward when a man, whose head had been pillowed on a Mexican saddle, rose from the ground in front of a tepee, made of blankets on crossed sticks, and seated himself on an old tree-stump where he proceeded to light a cigarette.

In the little tepee, sheltered by an overhanging rock, the Girl was still sleeping; and the man, sitting opposite the mound of earth and rock on which it was built, was Johnson.

A week had passed since the lovers had left Cloudy Mountain, and each day, at the moment when the sun burst above the snow-capped mountains, found them up and riding slowly eastward.  No attempt whatever was made at haste, but, instead, now climbing easily to the top of the passes, now descending into the valleys, they rode slowly on, ever loathe to leave behind them the great forests and high mountains.

Noon of each day found them always resting in some glen where the sun made golden lacework of the branches over their heads; while at the approach of night when the great orb was no longer to be seen through the tree-tops and twilight was fast settling upon the woods, they would halt near a pool of a dancing brook where, with the relish of fatigue, they would partake of their rations; and then, when the silences came on, Johnson would proceed to put up with loving skill the Girl’s rude quarters and, stretching himself out on a gentle slope, covered with pine needles matted close together, the man and the Girl would go to sleep listening to the music of the stream as it gurgled and dashed along, foaming and leaping, over the rocks and beneath the little patches of snow forgotten by the sun.  And to these two, whether in the depths of the vast forest or, as now, at the edge of the merciless desert, stretching away like a world without end, their environment seemed nothing less than a paradise.