e in these active preparations,
except to give occasional directions between his teeth, which were
contemplatively fixed over a clay pipe as he lay comfortably on his
back on the ground. Whatever enjoyment the rascal may have had in their
useless labors he did not show it, but it was observed that his left
eye often followed the broad figure of the ex-vaquero, Pedro, and often
dwelt on that worthy's beetling brows and half-savage face. Meeting that
baleful glance once, Pedro growled out an oath, but could not resist a
hideous fascination that caused him again and again to seek it.

The scene was weird enough without Wiles's eye to add to its wild
picturesqueness. The mountain towered above,--a heavy Rembrandtish
mass of black shadow,--sharply cut here and there against a sky so
inconceivably remote that the world-sick soul must have despaired of
ever reaching so far, or of climbing its steel-blue walls. The stars
were large, keen, and brilliant, but cold and steadfast. They did not
dance nor twinkle in their adamantine setting. The furnace fire painted
the faces of the men an Indian red, glanced on brightly colored blanket
and serape, but was eventually caught and absorbed in the waiting
shadows of the black mountain, scarcely twenty feet from the furnace
door. The low, half-sung, half-whispered foreign speech of the group,
the roaring of the furnace, and the quick, sharp yelp of a coyote on
the plain below were the only sounds that broke the awful silence of the
hills.

It was almost dawn when it was announced that the ore had fused. And it
was high time, for the pot was slowly sinking into the fast-crumbling
oven. Concho uttered a jubilant "God and Liberty," but Don Jose Wiles
bade him be silent and bring stakes to support the pot. Then Don Jose
bent over the seething mass. It was for a moment only. But in that
moment this accomplished metallurgist, Mr. Joseph Wiles, had quietly
dropped a silver half dollar into the pot!

Then he charged them to keep up the fires and went to sleep--all but one
eye.

Dawn came with dull beacon fires on the near hill tops, and, far in the
East, roses over the Sierran snow. Birds twittering in the alder fringes
a mile below, and the creaking of wagon wheels,--the wagon itself a
mere cloud of dust in the distant road,--were heard distinctly. Then
the melting pot was solemnly broken by Don Jose, and the glowing
incandescent mass turned into the road to cool.

And then the metallurgis