But Joan could not answer.  The word gold was a stab.  Besides, she saw Aunt Jane and two neighbors standing before a log cabin, beginning to show signs of interest in the approaching procession.

Joan fell back a little, trying to screen herself behind Jim.  Then Jim halted with a cheery salute.

“For the land’s sake!” ejaculated a sweet-faced, gray-haired woman.

“If it isn’t Jim Cleve!” cried another.

Jim jumped off and hugged the first speaker.  She seemed overjoyed to see him and then overcome.  Her face began to work.

“Jim!  We always hoped you’d—­you’d fetch Joan back!”

“Sure!” shouted Jim, who had no heart now for even an instant’s deception.  “There she is!”

“Who? ...  What?”

Joan slipped out of her saddle and, tearing off the mask, she leaped forward with a little sob.

“Auntie!  Auntie! ...  It’s Joan—­alive—­well! ...  Oh, so glad to be home! ...  Don’t look at my clothes—­look at me!”

Aunt Jane evidently sustained a shock of recognition, joy, amaze, consternation, and shame, of which all were subservient to the joy.  She cried over Joan and murmured over her.  Then, suddenly alive to the curious crowd, she put Joan from her.

“You—­you wild thing!  You desperado!  I always told Bill you’d run wild some day! ...  March in the house and get out of that indecent rig!”

That night under the spruces, with the starlight piercing the lacy shadows, Joan waited for Jim Cleve.  It was one of the white, silent, mountain nights.  The brook murmured over the stones and the wind rustled the branches.

The wonder of Joan’s home-coming was in learning that Uncle Bill Hoadley was indeed Overland, the discoverer of Alder Creek.  Years and years of profitless toil had at last been rewarded in this rich gold strike.

Joan hated to think of gold.  She had wanted to leave the gold back in Cabin Gulch, and she would have done so had Jim permitted it.  And to think that all that gold which was not Jim Cleve’s belonged to her uncle!  She could not believe it.

Fatal and terrible forever to Joan would be the significance of gold.  Did any woman in the world or any man know the meaning of gold as well as she knew it?  How strange and enlightening and terrible had been her experience!  She had grown now not to blame any man, honest miner or bloody bandit.  She blamed only gold.  She doubted its value.  She could not see it a blessing.  She absolutely knew its driving power to change the souls of men.  Could she ever forget that vast ant-hill of toiling diggers and washers, blind and deaf and dumb to all save gold?

Always limned in figures of fire against the black memory would be the forms of those wild and violent bandits!  Gulden, the monster, the gorilla, the cannibal!  Horrible as was the memory of him, there was no horror in thought of his terrible death.  That seemed to be the one memory that did not hurt.