were
crowded with displays of ore. The hub-bub about these places was fierce,
unbearable. Young men, with their handkerchiefs in their collars,
hurried from one office to another, warm with excitement, flapping great
bunches of letters and memoranda in their hands as they hurried.
Messenger boys ran up and down the streets with telegrams. Buyers from
the Kansas smelters, smelters in Illinois, smelters up about St. Louis,
smelters in Indiana, smelters in Wales, nosed around like ferrets. Fine
young men, who were supposed to look after the interests of the big
foreign companies, sauntered out of bar-rooms, doing violence to the
supposition. Map-sellers whacked their hands with folders. Wooden booths
flung signs to the streets bigger than the booths themselves: "Mineral
Companies Promoted," "Mining and Smelting," "Mines, Options,
Leases,"--there was no end to the variations of the eternal theme of
mining. Town lots, switches of flats, and hill ridges were being swapped
and sold and leased from the curb-stone; leases were being made from
buggies and options were being granted from a horse's back.

"Whewee!" marvelled Steering, with a little itch of fear for the ore-mad
people, "legal forms are being put to fearful strains, are they not,
with all this heedless buying and selling?"

Madeira laughed loudly, "God bless you, legal forms! All that a man who
wants to sell has to do is to throw a plank, any little rotten plank,
across the chasm of future litigation and ten buyers will walk it with
nerves of steel." He patted Steering's shoulder. "My boy, it's this
headlong impetus that assures the success of the Canaan Company. If I
get that thing started once, all I have to do is to advertise it down
here a week. The stock will go like hot-cakes. People don't care what
they buy, just so they buy. They've got no sense of value left. Why, a
man found an outcrop of a zinc lode under his chicken-coop
yesterday--and to-day the price of chicken-coops has gone up." Madeira
patted Steering's shoulder again and laughed again, pleased at his
aptness in figuring the thing out.

"He's just exactly right," said the girl, nodding at Steering. "Over
here the average man needs a guardian to keep him out of the clutches of
the 'boodlers.' I almost hate to see this sort of excitement come into
Canaan. Father has been pretty busy all his life looking after infant
men, but from now on his plight is going to be pitiable. I saw that
yesterday aftern