A few clouds lazily huddled in the west apparently had
gone to rest with the sun on beds of somnolent poppies. There was a
gleam as of golden water everywhere along the horizon, washing out the
cold snowpeaks, and drowning even the rising moon. The creek caught it
here and there, until, in grim irony, it seemed to bear their broken
sluice-boxes and useless engines on the very Pactolian stream they had
been hopefully created to direct and carry. But by some peculiar trick
of the atmosphere, the perfect plenitude of that golden sunset glory
was lavished on the rugged sides and tangled crest of the Lone Star
mountain. That isolated peak, the landmark of their claim, the gaunt
monument of their folly, transfigured in the evening splendor, kept its
radiance unquenched long after the glow had fallen from the encompassing
skies, and when at last the rising moon, step by step, put out the fires
along the winding valley and plains, and crept up the bosky sides of
the canyon, the vanishing sunset was lost only to reappear as a golden
crown.
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