Roy Norton

“ Neither the desert's vastness, the mountain's ruggedness, nor the forest's impenetrableness had been strong enough to separate them, but now that mightier thing, the love of woman, threatened to come between. ”

“ Even the noise of his singing was lost in the rush. The partners forgot their trouble and admiringly watched the work and the running sluice-boxes where gathered the muddy gold. They chewed tobacco steadily, their jaws sending their beards in and out with regularity. It was a great innovation, this visit. They almost forgot their mission. McCarthy saw them and shut down the water.
"Hello!" he called. "Glad to see you."
"Glad to see you," said Ezra. "Yes, glad to see you," piped Abner. Then, "Works well," they said, in unison.
McCarthy was puzzled. ”

“ Neither tears nor weeds were affected by the widow; she was a little too used to "tough luck" and a little too angular and sharp-featured for either. One of the kind of women who seem to take nearly everything as a matter of course and all in the day's work. But the partners were tender-hearted old fellows, as becomes men whose lives had been passed out in God's good open, and from the time of Sands's death their trouble began. ”

“ Abner's dyin' in there—of a broken heart. He ain't never been the same," and here he paused and with an unconsciously tragic gesture waved his arm at the partition, "since that thing was built." At last he was awake to the fact that it had divided their lives.
The former Mrs. Sands didn't seem to mind much. About the only divorce that could have jarred her, Hugh said, was from the scrubbing-brush.
About a hundred feet below their cabin the partners built one for her much more pretentious than their own. They devoted great time and care to its fitting—and wrought well. ”

“ The kind he had seen on the selvaged edges of the world were not the kind he had wanted for companions, and certainly all women outside of dance-halls looked like angels and were highly unapproachable. ”