st bring down?"
Madeira turned to Steering before Throcker could reply. "Whenever a
miner's voice shakes and sings like that, his last blast has meant a
heap."

"You are right, sir!" cried Throcker, "we opened up a face yesterday
that,--well, it's going to take us weeks to handle even the loose ore
we've brought down, sir. Come this way, Miss Sally, please ma'am."

Steering began to wish that the mine-boss were not so happy. It had an
electric effect upon him. And he began to wish that he himself were not
so happy. He dreaded developments that would surely be change.

"Well, Throcker, my boy, my ledge of Cherokee runs up here from the
Canaan Tigmores, d'you know that?" said Madeira. He put his thumbs in
his pockets and rocked upon the balls of his feet with a springing,
tip-toe movement, as Throcker stopped them in front of a shaft out of
whose cavernous depths a cage was swinging toward them. From Madeira's
manner you might have inferred that the Cherokee had a Madeira permit to
"run up here."

In the cage it was necessary for Steering to extend his arm behind Miss
Madeira, as there were no sides between the great cables at the four
corners. It was not a very large cage and the number on it crowded it,
so that the girl rested lightly on Steering's arm. He could think of no
place so deep down that he would not be well satisfied to journey to it
like that.

But there came a jolt and a jar, the cage settled upon the stope, and
the journey was over. Throcker led the way through a thick underground
gloom. Great masses of crush-rock slid under foot, there was a black
drip from ceiling and walls, and the excavation was filled with the
hollow boom of the water-and air-pumps. With lights flaring uncertainly,
they followed the mine-boss out upon a rocky crag that gave upon a deep
abyss, faintly illuminated by the flicker of the lamps of the working
force below and by torches set in the wall. There was an upward slope in
the formation of the ledge from the bottom of the cavern to the spur
upon which they stood, but it was made by irregular juttings with ugly,
saw-tooth projections. Unless they were very near the edge they could
not follow the dim outline of the slope at all. Throcker in his
eagerness to point out the ore, shining like specks of gold all up and
down the slope, worked dangerously near the edge, but he was accustomed
and recovered his balance easily when a piece of his support crumbled
away under his feet. Ste