nds worked constantly at button-holes, or at lapels, or with
watch-guards. When acquaintances passed on the street they did not say
"how-do-you-do"; they looked at each other's bulging pockets and said,
"lemme see your rock." What Steering and the girl heard as they waited
in the road-cart was fragmentary but significant: "Scotch Company will
divide off another one hundred thousand acres, so they say--No,
sirree-bob, no more hand-jigging for me--Wouldn't take one-quarter of a
million for it, if you'd give it to me--Boston Company is bound to make
millions--Yes, that's Madeira,--Canaan Tigmores--Oh, he will mint money
out of it, no doubt in the world about that he goes in to win----"

The girl turned to Steering with pleased pride. "You see? He always
wins. People expect him to." Madeira was over at the edge of his seat,
talking earnestly to the man on the curb. Steering, beside the girl,
looking down at her, not seeing Madeira because of her, nodded
approvingly, the approval being for her honesty, her sweetness, her
vitality. Something, perhaps the near climax for her father's enterprise
at Canaan, seemed to have keyed her to a high pitch. Steering, who by
now had had opportunities to see her often, had never seen her so
beautiful, nor so quick of expression in word and look. Her voice
thrilled him; and while he was thrilling, Madeira's voice came on to
him: "You needn't hold back on that account," Madeira was saying: "God
bless you, I've got the next heir in the deal, too."

"Oh-ho," said the girl, who also heard, "we are taking you for granted,
aren't we?" Steering only smiled at her again. He had fallen into the
habit of smiling at her, and some prescience seemed to urge him to
exercise the habit while he could.

Madeira was turning from the man on the curb: "All right, I'll allot you
one thousand shares, eh? Good-day.--Pet, you'd better drive on out to
Chitwood, lickety-split."

Miss Madeira put the whip to her horses, and they left the Joplin
streets behind them, and sped out a gritty white road that crossed a
lean sweep of prairie. Ahead of them Steering could see presently a sort
of settlement; wooden sheds, wide and low; hoister shafts, tall and
slim, on stilts; scaffolding; pipes; chimneys; tramways; surface
railways. His eyes leaped from moundlike piles of tailings, the powdery
crush spit out by the concentrating mills, to boulder-like heaps of
rocks that had been wheeled away to save the teeth of the mills