She felt a new weight in the cruelty whereby the owners of the “Laughing Water” claim had been suddenly bereft of all they possessed after all their patient years of serving here in this arid waste of minerals.  The older men in Van’s partnership she pitied.

For Van she felt a sense of championing love.  His cause was her cause, come what might—­at least until she could no longer keep alive her hope.  Her passion to set herself to rights in his mind was great, but secondary, after all, to the love in her heart, which would not, could not die, and which, by dint of its intensity, bore her onward to fight for his rights.

Alone so much in the burning land all day, she had long, long hours in which to think of Van, long hours in which to contemplate the silence and the vast dispassion of this mountain world.  Her own inward burning offset the heat of air and earth; a sense of the aridness her heart would know without Van’s love once more returned, was counter to the aridness of all these barren rocks.  The fervor of her love it was that bore her onward, weary, sore, and drooping.

What would happen at the end of day, if Pratt should confirm the Lawrence survey, bestowing the claim on Bostwick and McCoppet, she did not dare to think.  Her excitement increased with every chain length moving her onward towards the cove.  She did not know the hills or ravines, the canyons descended or acclivities so toilsomely climbed, and, therefore, had not a guide in the world to raise or depress her hope.  There was nothing to do but sustain the weary march and await the survey’s end.

All day in Goldite, meanwhile, Van had been working towards an end.  He had two hundred dollars, the merest drop in the bucket, as he knew, with which to fight the Bostwick combination.  He was thoroughly aware that even when the line could be run, establishing some error or fraud on the part of surveyor Lawrence, the fight would barely be opened.

McCoppet and Bostwick, with thousands of dollars at command, could delay him, block his progress, force him into court, and perhaps even beat him in the end.  The enginery of dollars was crushing in its might.  Nevertheless, if a survey showed that the line had been falsely moved, he felt he could somewhat rely upon himself to make the seat of war too warm for comfort.

There was no surveyor nearer than two hundred miles, with Pratt, as Van expressed it, “camping with the foe.”  He had shaken his partners untimely from their beds that morning—­(the trio were mining nights, on the four-to-midnight shift)—­and busied them all with the work of the day, by way of making preparations.

He spent nearly twenty silver dollars on the wire, telegraphing various towns to secure a competent man.  He sent a friend to the Government office, where Lawrence was up to his ears in work, and procured all the data, including metes and bounds, of the reservation tract before its fateful opening.