e his signal and the people began to swarm down the hillside
into Choke Gulch, defiling through the Gulch toward a great shed that
stood backed up to the hillside arrogantly. Although all Canaan had
watched the building and rigging day by day, in Choke Gulch, the sight
of the shed made the people almost hysterical, as though they had never
seen the "plant" of the Canaan Mining and Development Company before,
the shack office, the tool-house, the big proud mill shed, the tramway,
the hoister. There was a group already ranged at the door of the
engine-room as the people came on. Bruce Steering and his wife, Old
Bernique, and the tramp-boy were in the centre of the group.

"We are all steamed up!" cried Bruce. "Make ready there, boys! Hurrah
for the greatest zinc run in the greatest State in the Union! _Now_,
Piney!"

The tramp-boy, on his face an unaccustomed appreciation of this larger
side of the workaday world, stepped back inside the engine-room, laid
his hand on a throttle, and at the signal, as if by magic, there was a
whirr of slipping bands, a mighty throb, the renewed fashing of water
down the jigs, a grinding, a pounding, a crunching, a gurgling; and a
long, resonant shout went up again and again from the elastic throats of
the exalted Canaanites; for the first mill of the Canaan Mining and
Development Company was running!

Later on someone over in the crowd spoke. "Pity Mist' Crit Madeira aint
here to see all this. Haow he woulda taken to it. That son-in-law of his
woulda jes adzackly suited Mist' Crit. Pity he had to die off
sudden-like jes whend ev'thing wuz comin' araoun'." It was a woman's
voice and it was all softened with pity.

"Yass, oh yass," said a man next her gingerly. He was a man who had not
believed in Crit Madeira, but it occurred to him that this was not the
time or the place to recall that.

The evening of that gala day was a glorious evening. Rich and warm and
beautiful, self-indulgent nature had swaddled herself about in barbaric
bands of colour, a drowsy opulence of green and scarlet, soft-toned
amber and pale, veiled azure. It was an hour when the senses riot in
carnival, when colour sings and sound seems pink and gold, when light
is fragrant and flowers emit sparks of light.

Steering and his wife stood in the Garden of Dreams and the hour swirled
up to them out of the sunset, mystical, urgent, sweet. The house was
shut and locked behind them. Below them was the shivering Di. Off