The same spring a breath of war swept over a foul, decaying quagmire of the whole land, before which such passing deeds as these were blown as vapor.  It called men of all rank and condition to battle for a nation’s life, and among the first to respond were those into whose boyish hands had been placed the nation’s honor.  It returned the epaulets to Poindexter’s shoulder with the addition of a double star, carried him triumphantly to the front, and left him, at the end of a summer’s day and a hard-won fight, sorely wounded, at the door of a Blue Grass farmhouse.  And the woman who sought him out and ministered to his wants said timidly, as she left her hand in his, “I told you I should live to repay you.”

LEFT OUT ON LONE STAR MOUNTAIN.

CHAPTER I

There was little doubt that the Lone Star claim was “played out.”  Not dug out, worked out, washed out, but played out.  For two years its five sanguine proprietors had gone through the various stages of mining enthusiasm; had prospected and planned, dug and doubted.  They had borrowed money with hearty but unredeeming frankness, established a credit with unselfish abnegation of all responsibility, and had borne the disappointment of their creditors with a cheerful resignation which only the consciousness of some deep Compensating Future could give.  Giving little else, however, a singular dissatisfaction obtained with the traders, and, being accompanied with a reluctance to make further advances, at last touched the gentle stoicism of the proprietors themselves.  The youthful enthusiasm which had at first lifted the most ineffectual trial, the most useless essay, to the plane of actual achievement, died out, leaving them only the dull, prosaic record of half-finished ditches, purposeless shafts, untenable pits, abandoned engines, and meaningless disruptions of the soil upon the Lone Star claim, and empty flour sacks and pork barrels in the Lone Star cabin.

They had borne their poverty, if that term could be applied to a light renunciation of all superfluities in food, dress, or ornament, ameliorated by the gentle depredations already alluded to, with unassuming levity.  More than that:  having segregated themselves from their fellow-miners of Red Gulch, and entered upon the possession of the little manzanita-thicketed valley five miles away, the failure of their enterprise had assumed in their eyes only the vague significance of the decline and fall of a general community, and to that extent relieved them of individual responsibility.  It was easier for them to admit that the Lone Star claim was “played out” than confess to a personal bankruptcy.  Moreover, they still retained the sacred right of criticism of government, and rose superior in their private opinions to their own collective wisdom.  Each one experienced a grateful sense of the entire responsibility of the other four in the fate of their enterprise.