He waved an arm slowly over the empty landscape.
“That’s a fact—Monument doesn’t seem greatly rushed with business,” Brainard observed, taking the proffered seat beside the old man. “What’s the matter with the place?”
“The matter is that nothing has been doing in this here camp for ’most ten years,” the miner replied, pointing to the smokeless smelter.
“Mine’s all right—they never really got into it. The money gave out!”
The old man explained, in his placid drawl, how Monument once had great hopes. Then there had been a dozen Waldorfs in full swing. The smelter had been built, and shafts sunk in the red-brown hills behind the town.
“That’s what they called it, and it’s as good a mine as there ever was in Arizony—better ore than the El Verde ever had—more money in it than three El Verdes rolled into one, I say!”
The old man spat contemptuously at a venturesome lizard.
“Them panic times came along, and the fellow that owned the Melody went broke. He went back to Frisco. I always expected him to ride into camp some day, when the panic was over, hitch down there at the Waldorf, and sing out, ‘Howdy, Steve!’ and things would begin to hum once more. But he never come back. Guess it’s likely he ain’t made good out in California.”
“Perhaps he’s dead now,” Brainard suggested.
“P’r’aps—but some other feller will work the mine, one of these days. Copper’s booming all over the world, you understand. I’m waiting for that day!”
“What is that large house on the hill?” Brainard asked, pointing to the lonely mansion beyond the town.
“That’s where the old man lived—Krutzmacht’s house,” he replied. “He used to live there with his folks.”
“He had a family, then?” Brainard inquired quickly.
“Some said she warn’t really his wife—couldn’t be, because she had a husband where she came from, back East. I don’t know. I never asked him. Folks always talk, you understand. Well, she’s dead now. The old man left her here when he went away. She stayed on with the girl—”
“Her darter, stranger—not his, I guess. She was a scraggly little black-haired thing, more like a boy.”
Brainard smiled as his young man’s dream of a beautiful heroine, with aristocratic manners and gracious character, crumbled at the miner’s touch.