She did the work; he got the credit and reward.  In the Northwest Territory a married woman cannot stake or record a creek, bench, or quartz claim; so Edwin Bentham went down to the Gold Commissioner and filed on Bench Claim 23, second tier, of French Hill.  And when April came they were washing out a thousand dollars a day, with many, many such days in prospect.

At the base of French Hill lay Eldorado Creek, and on a creek claim stood the cabin of Clyde Wharton.  At present he was not washing out a diurnal thousand dollars; but his dumps grew, shift by shift, and there would come a time when those dumps would pass through his sluice-boxes, depositing in the riffles, in the course of half a dozen days, several hundred thousand dollars.  He often sat in that cabin, smoked his pipe, and dreamed beautiful little dreams,—­dreams in which neither the dumps nor the half-ton of dust in the P. C. Company’s big safe, played a part.

And Grace Bentham, as she washed tin dishes in her hillside cabin, often glanced down into Eldorado Creek, and dreamed,—­not of dumps nor dust, however.  They met frequently, as the trail to the one claim crossed the other, and there is much to talk about in the Northland spring; but never once, by the light of an eye nor the slip of a tongue, did they speak their hearts.

This is as it was at first.  But one day Edwin Bentham was brutal.  All boys are thus; besides, being a French Hill king now, he began to think a great deal of himself and to forget all he owed to his wife.  On this day, Wharton heard of it, and waylaid Grace Bentham, and talked wildly.  This made her very happy, though she would not listen, and made him promise to not say such things again.  Her hour had not come.

But the sun swept back on its northern journey, the black of midnight changed to the steely color of dawn, the snow slipped away, the water dashed again over the glacial drift, and the wash-up began.  Day and night the yellow clay and scraped bedrock hurried through the swift sluices, yielding up its ransom to the strong men from the Southland.

And in that time of tumult came Grace Bentham’s hour.

To all of us such hours at some time come,—­that is, to us who are not too phlegmatic.

Some people are good, not from inherent love of virtue, but from sheer laziness.  But those of us who know weak moments may understand.

Edwin Bentham was weighing dust over the bar of the saloon at the Forks—­altogether too much of his dust went over that pine board—­when his wife came down the hill and slipped into Clyde Wharton’s cabin.  Wharton was not expecting her, but that did not alter the case.  And much subsequent misery and idle waiting might have been avoided, had not Father Roubeau seen this and turned aside from the main creek trail.  ‘My child,—­’ ’Hold on, Father Roubeau!  Though I’m not of your faith, I respect you; but you can’t come in between this woman and me!’ ’You know what you are doing?’ ’Know!  Were you God Almighty, ready to fling me into eternal fire, I’d bank my will against yours in this matter.’  Wharton had placed Grace on a stool and stood belligerently before her.