Page:The New Penelope.djvu/194



"What is there to do? Everything is flat; there is neither business nor money in this cursed country. I've stayed here trying to sell my mine, until I'm dead broke; nothing to live on here, and nothing to get out with. What I'm to do with my wife there, I don't know. Let her die, perhaps, and throw her bones up that ravine to bleach in the sun. God! what a position to be in!"

"But you certainly must propose to do something, and that speedily. Couldn't you see it was half that that brought this illness on your wife; the inevitable which she saw closing down upon you?"

"If I cannot sell my mine soon, I'll blow out my brains, as that poor German did last week. Alice heard the report of the shot which killed him, and I think it hastened on her sickness."

"And so you propose to treat her to another such scene, and put an end to her?" said Earle, savagely.

"Better so than to let her starve," Jack returned, growing pale with the burden of possibilities which oppressed him. "How the devil I am to save her from that last, I don't know. There is neither business, money, nor credit in this infernal town. I've been everywhere in this district, asking for a situation at something, and cannot get anything better than digging ground on the new road."

"Even that might be better than starving," said Dr. Earle.

Jack was a faithful nurse; Dr. Earle an attentive physician; young people with elastic constitutions die hard: so Alice began to mend, and in a fortnight was convalescent. Jack got a situation in a quartz mill where the Doctor was part owner.

Left all day alone in the cabin, Alice began staring again at the dreary mountains whose walls inclosed her on every side. The bright scarlet and yellow flowers which grew out of their parched soil sometimes tempted her to a brief walk; but the lightness of the air fatigued her, and she did not care to clamber after them.