"I shall be comfortable here," replied the girl, and smiled farewell at
him.
And while Donnegan went down the slope full of darkness he thought of
that smile.
The Corner spread more clearly before him with every step he made. It
was a type of the gold-rush town. Of course most of the dwellings were
tents--dog tents many of them; but there was a surprising sprinkling of
wooden shacks, some of them of considerable size. Beginning at the very
edge of the town and spread over the sand flats were the mines and the
black sprinkling of laborers. And the town itself was roughly jumbled
around one street. Over to the left the main road into The Corner
crossed the wide, shallow ford of the Young Muddy River and up this road
he saw half a dozen wagons coming, wagons of all sizes; but nothing went
out of The Corner. People who came stayed there, it seemed.
He dropped over the lower hills, and the voice of the gold town rose to
him. It was a murmur like that of an army preparing for battle. Now and
then a blast exploded, for what purpose he could not imagine in this
school of mining. But as a rule the sounds were subdued by the distance.
He caught the muttering of many voices, in which laughter and shouts
were brought to the level of a whisper at close hand; and through all
this there was a persistent clangor of metallic sounds. No doubt from
the blacksmith shops where picks and other implements were made or
sharpened and all sorts of repairing carried on. But the predominant
tone of the voice of The Corner was this persistent ringing of metal. It
suggested to Donnegan that here was a town filled with men of iron and
all the gentler parts of their natures forgotten. An odd place to bring
such a woman as Lou Macon, surely!
He reached the level, and entered the town.
11
Hunting for news, he went naturally to the news emporium which took the
place of the daily paper--namely, he went to the saloons. But on the way
he ran through a liberal cross-section of The Corner's populace. First
of all, the tents and the ruder shacks. He saw little sheet-iron stoves
with the tin dishes piled, unwashed, upon the tops of them when the
miners rushed back to their work; broken handles of picks and shovels;
worn-out shirts and overalls lay where they had been tossed; here was a
flat strip of canvas supported by four four-foot poles and without
shelter at the sides, and the belongings of one careless miner tumbled
beneath this miserable shelter; another man had striven for some
semblance of a home and he had framed a five-foot walk leading up to the
closed flap of his tent with stones of a regular size. But nowhere was
there a sign of life, and would not be until semidarkness brought the
unwilling workers back to the tents.
Out of this district he passed quickly onto the main street, and here
there was a different atmosphere. The first thing he saw was a man
dressed as a cowpuncher from belt to spurs--spurs on a miner--but above
the waist he blossomed in a frock coat and a silk hat. Around the coat
he had fastened his belt, and the shirt beneath the coat was common
flannel, open at the throat. He walked, or rather staggered, on the arm
of an equally strange companion who was arrayed in a white silk shirt,
white flannel trousers, white dancing pumps, and a vast sombrero! But as
if this was not sufficient protection for his head, he carried a parasol
of the most brilliant green silk and twirled it above his head. The two
held a wavering course and went blindly past Donnegan.
It was sufficiently clear that the storekeeper had followed the gold.
He noted a cowboy sitting in his saddle while he rolled a cigarette.
Obviously he had come in to look things over rather than to share in the
mining, and he made the one sane, critical note in the carnival of noise
and color. Donnegan began to pass stores. There was the jeweler's; the
gent's furnishing; a real estate office--what could real estate be doing
on the Young Muddy's desert? Here was the pawnshop, the windows of which
were already packed. The blacksmith had a great establishment, and the
roar of the anvils never died away; feed and grain and a dozen
lunch-counter restaurants. All this had come to The Corner within six
weeks.
Liquor seemed to be plentiful, too. In the entire length of the street
he hardly saw a sober man, except the cowboy. Half a dozen in one group
pitched silver dollars at a mark. But he was in the saloon district now,
and dominant among the rest was the big, unpainted front of a building
before which hung an enormous sign: