“Oh—­Van!” she finally cried, in a weak, hurt utterance, and back along the darkening hall she went, her hand with Glen’s crushed letter pressed hard upon her breast.

Van, for his part, far more torn than he could have believed possible, proceeded down the street in such a daze as a drunken man might experience, emerging from liquor’s false delights to life’s cold, merciless facts.  The camp was more emptied than he had ever known it since first it was discovered.  Only a handful of the reservation stragglers had returned.  The darkness would pour them in by hundreds.

Half way down the thoroughfare Van paused to remember what it was his body wanted.  It was food.  He started again, and was passing the bank when someone called from within.

“Hello, there—­Van!” came the cry.  “Hello!  Come in!”

Van obeyed mechanically.  The cashier, Rickart, it was who had shouted the summons—­a little, gray-eyed, thin-faced man, with a very long moustache.

“How are you, Rick?” said the horseman familiarly.  “What’s going on?”

“Haven’t you heard?—­you?” interrogated Rickart.  “I thought it was funny you were loafing along so leisurely.  Didn’t you know to-day was the day for the rush?”

“I did,” said Van.  “What about it?”

“Not much,” his friend replied, “except your claim has been jumped by McCoppet and one J. Searle Bostwick, who got on to the fact that the reservation line included all your ground.”

Van looked his incredulity.

“What’s the joke?” he said.  “I bite.  What’s the answer?”

“Joke?” the cashier echoed.  “Joke?  They had the line surveyed through, yesterday, and Lawrence confirmed their tip.  Your claim, I tell you, was on reservation ground, and McCoppet had his crowd on deck at six o’clock this morning.  They staked it out, according to law, as the first men on the job after the Government threw it open—­and there they are.”

Van leaned against the counter carelessly, and looked at his friend unmoved.

“Who told you the story?” he inquired.  “Who brought it into camp?”

“Why a dozen men—­all mad to think they never got on,” said Rickart, not without heat.  “It’s an outrage, Van!  You might have fought them off if you’d been on deck, and made the location yourself!  Where have you been?”

Van smiled.  The neatness of the whole arrangement began to be presented to his mind.

“Oh, I was out of the way all right,” he said.  “My friends took care of that.”

“I thought there was something in the wind, all along,” imparted the little cashier.  “Bostwick and McCoppet have been thicker than thieves for a week.  But the money they needed wasn’t Bostwick’s.  I wired to New York to get his standing—­and he’s got about as much as a pin.  But the girl stood in, you bet!  She’s got enough—­and dug up thirty thousand bucks to handle the crowd’s expenses.”