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.
The eyes of the young man were fixed upon it with more than a momentary picturesque interest.