ammer, hammer, hammer,
until your arm gets dead to the shoulder."

"It must be nice," she suggested with a half-concealed sigh, "to be able
to make money so easily. Have you always been a miner?"

"No, I was raised on a ranch, up in Colorado--but there's lots more
money in mining. I don't work by the day, I take contracts by the foot
where there's difficult or dangerous work. Sometimes I make forty
dollars a day. There's a knack about mining, like everything
else--you've got to know just how to drive your holes in order to break
the most ground--but give me a jack-hammer and enough men to muck out
after me and I can sink from sixteen to twenty feet a day, depending on
the rock. But here, of course, I'm working lone-handed and only make
about three feet a day."

"Oh," she murmured with a mild show of interest and Denver picked up his
hammer. Mother Trigedgo had warned him not to be too friendly, and now
he was learning why. He set out a huge fragment that had been blasted
from the face and swung his hammer again.

"Did you ever hear the 'Anvil Chorus'?" she asked watching him
curiously. "It's in the second act of 'Il Trovatore.'"

"Sure!" exclaimed Denver, "I heard Sousa's band play it! I've got it on
a record somewhere."

"No, but in a real opera--you'd be fine for that part. They have a row
of anvils around the back of the stage and as the chorus sing the gypsy
blacksmiths beat out the time by striking with their hammers. Back in
New York last year there was a perfectly huge man and he had a hammer as
big as yours that he swung with both hands while he sang. You reminded
me of him when I saw you working--don't you get kind of lonely,
sometimes?"

"Too busy," replied Denver turning to pick up another rock, "don't have
time for anything like that."

"Well, I wish I was that way," she sighed after a silence and Denver
smote ponderously at the rock.

"Why don't you work?" he asked at last and Drusilla's eyes flashed fire.

"I do!" she cried, "I work all the time! But that doesn't do me any
good. It's all right, perhaps, if you're just breaking rocks, or digging
dirt in some mine; but I'm trying to become a singer and you can't
succeed that way--work will get you only so far!"

"'S that so!" murmured Denver, and at the unspoken challenge the
brooding resentment of Drusilla burst forth.

"Yes, it is!" she exclaimed, "and, just because you've struck ore, that
doesn't prove that you're right in everything. I've