heard a worse one. Show me the woman who doesn’t know what she wants—and knowing, fails to go after it.”
“Oh, well—you get what I mean. How much farther is it?”
“We’re getting there. Five miles more.”
“Gad—I hope nothing’s happened to her.”
They rattled on, closer and closer to the low hills, brick red under the rays of the slowly rising moon. The road entered a narrow canyon, it almost disappeared, but like a homing thing Horace Greeley followed it intuitively.
“Got a flashlight?” Eden inquired.
“Yes. Why?”
“Stop a minute, and let me have it. I’ve an idea.”
He descended with the light, and carefully examined the road ahead. “She’s been along here,” he announced. “That’s the tread of her tires—I’d know it anywhere—I changed one of them for her. She’s—she’s up there somewhere, too. The car has been this way but once.”
He leaped back beside Holley, and the flivver sped on, round hairpin turns, and along the edge of a precipice. Presently it turned a final corner, and before them, nestled in the hills, was the ghost city of Petticoat Mine.
Bob Eden caught his breath. Under the friendly moon lay the remnants of a town, here a chimney and there a wall, street after street of houses crumbled now to dust. Once the mine had boomed and the crowd had come, they had built their homes here where the shafts sank deep, silver had fallen in price and the crowd had gone, leaving Petticoat Mine to the most deadly bombardment of all, the patient silent bombardment of the empty years.
They rode down Main Street, weaving in and out among black gaping holes that might have been made by bursting
