The long drive was in its final third, and the wagon track, which had transferred itself to the top of the level railroad grade, admitted speed.  By degrees the caravan became elongated, with the president still in the lead, the man on horseback indifferently ahead or behind, and the other two vehicles wide apart and well to the rear.  Their isolation was complete when she said: 

“Do you want me to say that I don’t recognize any of the symptoms, Mr. Ford?”

“Do I—­No!  Yes!—­that is, I—­Heavens! that is a terrible way to put it!  Of course I hope—­I hope you are in love—­with the right person.  If you’re not, I—­”

She was weeping silently; weeping because it would have been a sin to laugh.

“You—­called it a comedy a little while—­ago,” she faltered.  “In another minute it will be a tragedy.  Don’t you think we are getting too far behind the others?”

He whipped up obediently, but the horses were in no hurry.  At the rounding of the next shouldering hill the railroad grade entered a high, broad valley, the swelling hills on either side dotted with the dumps and tunnel-openings of the Copah gold-diggers.  Ford had not been through the upper part of the district since the previous summer of pathfindings, and at that time it was like a dozen other outlying and hardly accessible fields, scantily manned and languishing under the dry rot of isolation.  But now—­

He was looking curiously across at the opposing hillsides.  Black dots, dozens of them, were moving from ledge to ledge, pausing here and there to ply pick and shovel.  Now and then from some one of the dry arroyos came the echoes of a surface shot; dynamite cartridges thrust into the earth to clear away the drift to bed-rock.  Ford called his companion’s attention to the activities.

“See what it does to a mining country when a railroad comes within shouting distance,” he said.  “The last time I was over here, this valley was like a graveyard.  Now you’d think the entire population of Copah was up here prospecting for gold.”

“Is that what they are doing?” she asked.  Then suddenly:  “Where is your mine?—­the mine with my name?”

He laughed.

“I told you the simple truth.  I don’t know where it is; though I suppose it is up this way somewhere.  Yes, I remember, Grigsby said it was on Cow Mountain.”

The hill on their side of the valley threw out a long, low spur and the railroad-grade driving track swept in a long curve around the spur and crossed over to the foot of a slope dotted with the digging manikins.

“By Jove!” said Ford, still wondering.  “There are twice as many prospectors out here as there were inhabitants in Copah the last time I was over.  The camp ought to vote bonds and give the railroad company a bonus.”

Farther along, the grade hugged the hillside, skirting the acclivity where the shaft-houses of some of the older mines of the district were perched on little hillocks formed by their own dumps, within easy tramming distance of the railroad.  Opposite and directly below the nearest of these shaft-houses the two leading buckboards had stopped; and the president was once more standing up and beckoning vigorously to the laggards in the single-seated vehicle.