ws bureau, the scene where large deals were constantly
being conceived and promulgated--although they got no further. Each
inhabitant of Ore City had his set time for arriving and departing, and
he abided as closely by his schedule as though he kept office hours.

There was a generous box of saw-dust near the round sheet-iron stove
which set in the middle of the office, and there were many
straight-backed wooden chairs whose legs were steadied with baling wire
and whose seats had been highly polished by the overalls of countless
embryo mining magnates. On one side of the room was a small pine table
where Old Man Hinds walloped himself at solitaire, and on the other side
of the room was a larger table, felt-covered, kept sacred to the games
of piute and poker, where as much as three dollars sometimes changed
hands in a single night.

At the extreme end of the long office was a plush barber chair, and a
row of gilt mugs beneath a gilt mirror gave the place a metropolitan
air, although there was little doing in winter when whiskers and long
hair became assets.

Selected samples of ore laid in rows on the window-sills; there were
neat piles heaped in the corners, along the walls, and on every shelf,
while the cabinet-organ, of Jersey manufacture, with its ornamental rows
of false stops and keys, which was the distinguishing feature of the
office, had "spec'mins" on the bristling array of stands which stood out
from it in unexpected places like wooden stalagmites.

The cabinet-organ setting "catty-cornered" beside the roller-towel
indicated the presence of womankind, and it indicated correctly, for out
in the kitchen was Mrs. Alonzo Snow, and elsewhere about the hotel were
her two lovely daughters, the Misses Violet and Rosie Snow,--facetiously
known as "the Snowbirds."

Second to the stove in the office, the Snow family was the attraction in
the Hinds House, for the entertainment they frequently furnished was as
free as the wood that the _habitues_ fed so liberally to the sheet-iron
stove.

A psychological writer has asserted that when an extremely sensitive
person meets for the first time one who is to figure prominently in his
life, he experiences an inward tremor. Whether it was that Old Man Hinds
was not sufficiently sensitive or was too busy at the time to be
cognizant of inward tremors, the fact is he was not conscious of any
such sensation when the "Musical Snows" alighted stiffly from the Beaver
Creek stage;