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.
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