ting, Ballard and Bromley,
off duty for the time, lounged on the bungalow porch awaiting their cue.
There had been no awkward happenings thus far. The trains had arrived on
time; the carefully staged spectacle was running like a well-oiled piece
of mechanism; the August day, despite a threatening mass of storm cloud
gathering on the distant slopes of the background mountain range, was
perfect; and, thanks to Mr. Pelham's gift of leadership, the celebrators
had been judiciously wrought up to the pitch at which everything was
applauded and nothing criticised. Hence, there was no apparent reason
for Ballard's settled gloom; or for Bromley's impatience manifesting
itself in sarcastic flings at the company's secretary, an ex-politician
of the golden-tongued tribe, who was the oratorical spellbinder of the
moment.

"For Heaven's sake! will he never saw it off and let us get that stone
set?" gritted the assistant, when the crowd cheered, and the mellifluous
flood, checked for the applausive instant, poured steadily on. "Why in
the name of common sense did Mr. Pelham want to spring this batch of
human phonographs on us!"

"The realities will hit us soon enough," growled Ballard, whose
impatience took the morose form. Then, with a sudden righting of his
tilted camp-stool: "Good Lord, Loudon! Look yonder--up the canyon!"

The porch outlook commanded a view of the foothill canyon, and of a
limited area of the bowl-shaped upper valley. At the canyon head, and on
the opposite side of the river, three double-seated buckboards were
wheeling to disembark their passengers; and presently the Castle 'Cadia
house-party, led by Colonel Craigmiles himself, climbed the left-hand
path to the little level space fronting the mysterious mine.

"By Jove!" gasped Bromley; "I nearly had a fit--I thought they were
coming over here. Now what in the name of----"

"It's all right," cut in Ballard, irritably. "Why shouldn't the colonel
want to be present at his own funeral? And you needn't be afraid of
their coming over here. The colonel wouldn't wipe his feet on that mob
of money-hunters around the band-stand. See; they are making a private
box of the mine entrance."

The remark framed itself upon the fact. At the colonel's signal the
iron-bound tunnel door had swung open, and Wingfield and Blacklock,
junior, with the help of the buckboard drivers, were piling timbers on
the little plateau for the party's seating.

It was Colonel Craigmiles's ow