The doctor ran to the window, which he found already opened.  He ran back in a species of frenzy.

“Make her take it, make her take it!  God!” he said.  “Not to do anything—­not to do a thing!”

Queenie smiled at Van again—­terribly.  Her fingers felt like iron rods, pressing into his flesh.  As if to complete her renunciation she dropped his hand abruptly.  She mastered some violent convulsion that left the merest flicker of her life.

“Good-by, Van—­good luck,” she whispered faintly.

“Queenie!” he said.  “Queenie!”

Perhaps she heard.  After an ordeal that seemed interminable her face was calm and still, a faint smile frozen on her marble features.

Van waited there a long time.  Someway it seemed as if this thing could be undone.  The place was terribly still.  The doctor sat there as if in response to a duty.  He was dumb.

When Van went out, the man on the doorstep staggered in.

The moon was up.  It shone obliquely down into all that rock-lined basin, surrounded by the stern, forbidding hills—­the ancient, burned-out furnace of gold that man was reheating with his passions.  Afar in all directions the lighted tents presented a ghostly unreality, their canvas walls illumined by the candles glowing within.  A jargon of dance-hall music floated on the air.  Outside it all was the desert silence—­the silence of a world long dead.

Van would gladly have mounted his horse and ridden away—­far off, no matter where.  Goldite, bizarre and tragic—­a microcosm of the world that man has fashioned—­was a blot of discordant life, he felt, upon an otherwise peaceful world.  As a matter of fact it had only begun its evening’s story.

He stood in the road, alone, for several minutes, before he felt he could begin to resume the round of his own existence.  When he came at length to the main street’s blaze of light, a deeply packed throng could be seen in all the thoroughfare, compactly blocked in front of a large saloon.

Culver, the Government representative in the land-office needs, had been found in his office murdered.  He had been stabbed.  Van’s knife, bought for Gettysburg, had been employed—­and found there, red with its guilt.

All this Van was presently to discover.  He was walking towards the surging mob when a miner he had frequently seen came running up and halted in the light of a window.  Then the man began to yell.

“Here he is!” he cried.  “Van Buren!”

The mob appeared to break at the cry.  Fifty men charged down the street in a species of madness and Van was instantly surrounded.

CHAPTER XXI

IN THE SHADOW OF THE ROPE