A face haunted Cameron-a woman's face. It was there in the white heart of the dying campfire; it hung in the shadows that hovered over the flickering light; it drifted in the darkness beyond. This hour, when the day had closed and the lonely desert night set in with its dead silence, was one in which Cameron's mind was thronged with memories of a time long past-of a home back in Peoria, of a woman he had wronged and lost, and loved too late. He was a prospector for gold, a hunter of solitude, a lover of the drear, rock-ribbed infinitude, because he wanted to be alone to remember. The story describes the recent uprising along the border, and ends with the finding of the gold which two prospectors had willed to the girl who is the story's heroine.
About the Author: Zane Grey, the greatest and most prolific storyteller of the American West, was born in Zanesville, Ohio, on January 31, 1872. In his youth, Zane was a semi-professional Zane Greybaseball player and a half-hearted dentist, having studied dentistry to appease his father while on a baseball scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. He wanted above all to write and taught himself to do so with stern discipline to free his innate and immense storytelling capacity. Many a lean year came and went as he searched for a publisher, but Zane soon became the best-selling Western author of all time as well as the best selling author of non-fiction fishing novels. For most of the teens, 20s, and 30s, Zane had at least one novel in the top ten every year. His marriage in 1905 to Lina Roth, whom he called Dolly, was a triumph of the old-fashioned, "complimentary" model of matrimony, wherein the husband ranges freely to sustain the inspiration for his calling and the wife tends to the family, edits the manuscripts and makes deals with the publishers. It is fair to say that Dolly's belief in Zane's literaZane Greyry works was the single factor most responsible for the success of his lengthy career. Zane and Dolly had three children, Romer, Betty and Loren. Zane's breakthrough success of Heritage of the Desert in 1910 enabled him to establish a home in Altadena, California and a hunting lodge on the Mogollon Rim near Payson, Arizona. A lifelong passion for angling and the rich rewards of his writing also allowed him to roam the world's premier game-fishing grounds in his own schooners where he set thirteen deep-sea angling records, most of which stood for decades. Zane would develop and invent tackle still being used today and his exploits in fishing would gain him recognition as the "Father of Modern Big Game Fishing".