hate.  Why could not these miners, young and old, stay in their camps and keep their gold?  That was the fatality.  The pursuit was a dream—­a glittering allurement; the possession incited a lust for more, and that was madness.  Joan felt that in these reckless, honest miners there was a liberation of the same wild element which was the driving passion of Kells’s Border Legion.  Gold, then, was a terrible thing.

“Take me in there,” said Joan, conscious of her own excitement, and she indicated the dance-hall.

Kells laughed as if at her audacity.  But he appeared reluctant.

“Please take me—­unless—­” Joan did not know what to add, but she meant unless it was not right for her to see any more.  A strange curiosity had stirred in her.  After all, this place where she now stood was not greatly different from the picture imagination had conjured up.  That dance-hall, however, was beyond any creation of Joan’s mind.

“Let me have a look first,” said Kells, and he left Joan with Cleve.

When he had gone Joan spoke without looking at Cleve, though she held fast to his arm.

“Jim, it could be dreadful here—­all in a minute!” she whispered.

“You’ve struck it exactly,” he replied.  “All Alder Creek needed to make it hell was Kells and his gang.”

“Thank Heaven I turned you back in time! ...  Jim, you’d have—­have gone the pace here.”

He nodded grimly.  Then Kells returned and led them back through the room to another door where spectators were fewer.  Joan saw perhaps a dozen couples of rough, whirling, jigging dancers in a half-circle of watching men.  The hall was a wide platform of boards with posts holding a canvas roof.  The sides, were open; the lights were situated at each end-huge, round, circus tent lamps.  There were rude benches and tables where reeling men surrounded a woman.  Joan saw a young miner in dusty boots and corduroys lying drunk or dead in the sawdust.  Her eyes were drawn back to the dancers, and to the dance that bore some semblance to a waltz.  In the din the music could scarcely be heard.  As far as the men were concerned this dance was a bold and violent expression of excitement on the part of some, and for the rest a drunken, mad fling.  Sight of the women gave Joan’s curiosity a blunt check.  She felt queer.  She had not seen women like these, and their dancing, their actions, their looks, were beyond her understanding.  Nevertheless, they shocked her, disgusted her, sickened her.  And suddenly when it dawned upon her in unbelievable vivid suggestion that they were the wildest and most terrible element of this dark stream of humanity lured by gold, then she was appalled.

“Take me out of here!” she besought Kells, and he led her out instantly.  They went through the gambling-hall and into the crowded street, back toward camp.

“You saw enough,” said Kells, “but nothing to what will break out by and by.  This camp is new.  It’s rich.  Gold is the cheapest thing.  It passes from hand to hand.  Ten dollars an ounce.  Buyers don’t look at the scales.  Only the gamblers are crooked.  But all this will change.”