themselves into
the snowy range, with the gaunt, high-peaked summit of Mount Evans
scratching the sky in the distance.

There was a shimmer in the air, through which the trees were turned
into a bluer green, and the crags of the mountains made softer, the
gaping scars of prospect holes less lonely and less mournful with their
ever-present story of lost hopes. On a great boulder far at one side a
chipmunk chattered. Far down the road an ore train clattered along on
the way to the Sampler,--that great middleman institution which is a
part of every mining camp, and which, like the creamery station at the
cross roads, receives the products of the mines, assays them by its
technically correct system of four samples and four assayers to every
shipment, and buys them, with its allowances for freight, smelting
charges and the innumerable expenditures which must be made before
money can become money in reality. Fairchild sang louder than ever, a
wordless tune, an old tune, engendered in his brain upon a
paradoxically happy and unhappy night,--that of the dance when he had
held Anita Richmond in his arms, and she had laughed up at him as, by
her companionship, she had paid the debt of the Denver road. Fairchild
had almost forgotten that. Now, with memory, his brow puckered, and
his song died slowly away.

"What the dickens was she doing?" he asked himself at last. "And why
should she have wanted so terribly to get away from that sheriff?"

There was no answer. Besides, he had promised to ask for none. And
further, a shout from the road, accompanied by the roaring of a motor
truck, announced the fact that Harry was making his return.

Five men were with him, to help him carry in ropes, heavy pulleys,
weights and a large metal shaft bucket, then to move out the smaller of
the pumps and trundle away with them, leaving the larger one and the
larger engine for a single load. At last Harry turned to his
paraphernalia and rolled up his sleeves.

"'Ere 's where we work!" he announced. "It's us for a pulley and
bucket arrangement until we can get the 'oist to working and the skip
to running. 'Elp me 'eave a few timbers."

It was the beginning of a three-days' job, the building of a heavy
staging over the top of the shaft, the affixing of the great pulley and
then the attachment of the bucket at one end, and the skip, loaded with
pig iron, on the other. Altogether, it formed a sort of crude,
counterbalanced elevator, by