The other group, equally, if less openly, active, comprised the sheriff and three of his men.  They were trailing out the boundary of one man’s endurance, against fatigue, starvation, and the hatred of his kind.

Barger had been at his work once more, slaying and robbing for his needs.  He had killed a Piute trailer, put upon his tracks; he had robbed a stage, three private travelers, and a freight-team loaded with provisions.  He had lived on canned tomatoes and ginger snaps for a week—­and the empty tins sufficiently blazed his orbit.

He was known to be mounted, armed, and once more reduced to extremities in the way of procuring food.  A trap had been laid, a highway baited with an apparently defenseless wagon, with two mere desert prospectors and their outfit for a load—­and this he was expected to attack.

The morning waned and the afternoon was speeding.  Old Pratt, with Beth and Glen, was eager to finish by sunset.  The farther he walked the more the surveyor apparently warmed to his work.  Beth became footsore by noon.  But she made no complaint.  She plodded doggedly ahead, the ribbon-like “chain” creeping like a serpent, on and on before her.

At the forward end Glen was dragging the thing persistently over hills and dales, and bearing the rod for Pratt with his transit to sight.

The surveyor himself was at times as much as a mile or more behind, dumbly waving Glen to right or left, as he peered through his glass and set the course by the compass and angles of his transit.  Anon he signaled the two to wait, and Beth sat down to watch him come, “set up,” and wave them onward as before.

She was thus alone, at the end of the chain, for hours at a stretch.  So often as Pratt came up from the rear and established a station for his instrument, she asked how the line was working out, and what were the prospects for the end.

“Can’t tell till we get much closer to the claim,” said Pratt, with never varying patience.  “We’ll know before we die.”

In the heat that poured from sky and rocks it might have been possible to doubt the surveyor’s prediction.  But Beth went on.  Her exhaustion increased.  The glare of the cloudless sky and greenless earth seemed to burn all the moisture from her eyes.  The terrible silence, the dread austerity of mountains so rock-ribbed and desolate, oppressed her with a sense of awe.

She was toiling as many a man has toiled, through the ancient, burned-out furnace of gold, so intensely physical all about her; and also she was toiling no less painfully through the furnace of gold that love must ever create so long as the dross must be burned from human ore that the bullion of honor, loyalty, and faith may shine in its purity and worth.

She began to feel, in a slight degree, the tortures that Van, old Gettysburg, Napoleon, and Dave had undergone for many weary years.  It was not their weakness for the gold of earth that had drawn them relentlessly on in lands like these; it was more their fate, a species of doom, to which, like the helpless puppets that we are, we must all at last respond.