CHAPTER XX
THE GOBLET SURRENDERS ITS SECRET
A TOWN had grown and was called Summit City because Beatrice Corliss, with unlimited wealth at her beck and call, had willed it. Two other settlements began to materialize and take form at the ends of Sunrise Pass because Bill Steele, with large plans in his head, willed them into being. And now a third town of which no one thought yesterday, a town at Hell's Goblet, sprang almost overnight into existence, a feverish, clamouring, strident town, insistent upon crowding its way into the world because omnipotent circumstance shouted for it and beckoned it in. A certain word went echoing through the woods, from the Goblet to Camp Corliss and the Junction; to White Rock and the railroad towns up and down the transcontinental line; across the mountains to Grey Horse and Copperville and Gridley, and wherever it went men laid down their work and listened to it and felt it sweep through their imaginations even as it had swept through the forests, electrifying them. And the word was Gold.
Bill Steele suddenly was no longer the mad Steele, a fool and a busybody. He was a man to cultivate, a man whose slightest word should be caught and brooded over, a man to point out gravely and in envy. Bill Steele had found gold at the Goblet where from the first he had known it was waiting for him.
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