Polly's love for her father was
always very sweet and touching, and Barrett and I left them to
themselves at the meeting.

"I'm mighty glad to see you back, Jimmie, old man," Barrett declared,
when we had found a quiet corner in the rotunda. "You are looking like
a new man, and I guess you are one. And you are on your feet again
financially, too. We declared a dividend yesterday, and you've got a
bank account that will warm the cockles of your silly old heart."

"How is Gifford? and how are things at the mine?" I asked.

"Gifford is all right; only he's got too much money--doesn't know what
to do with it now that he has built all the new houses the camp will
stand for. And the Little Clean-Up is all right, too; though we are
digging into a small mystery just now."

"A mystery?" I queried.

"Yes. You remember how the branch vein in the two-hundred-foot level
was bearing off to the east?"

"I do."

"Well, three weeks ago the sloping carried us over into the Mary
Mattock ground, and I tell you what, Jimmie, I was more than glad we
had bought that claim outright while we could. The ore is richer than
anything we have found since we made the big strike at grass-roots, and
we'd be up against it good and hard if we hadn't paid those Nebraska
farmers what they asked and taken a clear title to the ground."

"But the mystery," I reminded him.

"It is a little trick of acoustics, I guess; it has happened in other
mines, so Hicks tells me. Some peculiar geological structure of the
porphyry in particular localities makes it carry sound like a telephone
wire. In that eastern adit of ours you can hear them working in the
Lawrenceburg as plainly as if they were only a few feet away."

"That is odd," I mused; "especially as the Lawrenceburg workings are
all in exactly the opposite direction--down the hill on their side of
the spur."

Barrett thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

"I have often wondered, Jimmie, if they really _are_ downhill. Nobody,
outside of the men on their own pay-roll, knows anything about it
definitely; and Blackwell wouldn't let an outside engineer go down his
shaft for a king's ransom. I know it, because I have tried to send
one. If the downhill story that we've been hearing should happen to be
a fake; if he should be under-cutting us, instead; it would explain a
heap of things."

"The stubborn lawsuit among others," I offered.

"Yes; the lawsuit. By the way, we've been up to our