Howard was entirely correct in his surmise, saving in the time he judged they must wait. Less than an hour had passed and the grass fire was still spreading with a fierce crackling sound and myriad sparks, when the vanguard of the gold-seekers came. Helen and Howard heard horses' hoofs, rattling stones, impatient voices, and withdrew a hundred yards from the gulch and into the shadows of a ring of boulders.
With the first came Bettins. His voice was the loudest, coming now and then distinctly; he employed the name of Howard and cursed it; he said something about his 'pals' Devine and True. A man to whom he was talking laughed at him. Thereafter half a dozen forms swarmed down into the gulch; the fire on either side of them was dying out along the gulch's edge; they cursed its heat when it offended them, took advantage of its light at all times, and more like ants than ever appeared to be running back and forth foolishly and aimlessly. But, apparently, Bettins got his stakes and his friends' back and the men with whom he had returned hastily staked out their own claims, all feverishly and by crude guesswork. There was perhaps not a man among them who knew the first thing about mining. Helen watched them in sheer fascination. Down there half in light, half in shadow, darting this way and that, they were like little gnomes playing some wild game of their own.
'They act like madmen,' she whispered. 'They run about as if everything had to be done in a minute.'
'Between them the crowd down there don't own, I'd say, fifty dollars. Each one is figuring that he has his chance to be a millionaire to-morrow. And they know that more men are coming. That's the way men think when they're in the gold rush. Look, there come some more!'
This time there were three men. They broke into a run when they heard voices; perhaps they had hoped to be first. Down into the bed of the gulch they plunged; one of them slipped and rolled and cursed; men laughed, and with the laughter dying in their throats broke off to yell a warning to some one to keep his feet off a claim already staked out. Within an hour after the return of Bettins there were a score of men on the spot; again and again rose sharp words as every man, alert to protect his own interests, was ready for a quarrel. They dragged stones to mark their boundaries; they cut and hammered stakes, they left their chosen sites now and then and altered their first judgments and restaked somewhere else. They swarmed up the banks of the gulch on both sides, they hastened back and forth, they staked everywhere. As the time passed more and more came plunging into the orgy of gold until at last the night was never quiet. Harsh words passed and once blows were struck and a man went down and lay still. Another time there was the report of a gun and a boom of many voices commanding order and that quarrels be taken to a safe distance and out of the way of busy men.