ischievously when she gave him a vein of rich quartz through which
to quarry his way. The mere delving of the rock had produced two
thousand dollars' worth of ore, of which sum he took a moiety by
agreement with the company that purchased his rights.

People in Leadville soon discovered that Spencer was a bright
man,--"yes, sir, a citizen of whom the chief mining city of the Rocky
Mountains has every reason to be proud,"--and the railway magnate who
had nearly ruined him by years of hostility buried the past
grandiloquently with a _mot_.

"Charles K. Spencer can't be sidetracked," he said. "That K isn't in
his name by accident. Look at it,--a regular buffer of a letter! Tell
you what, you may monkey with Charles; but when you hit the K look out
for trouble."

Whereupon the miners laughed, and said that the president was a mighty
smart man too, and Spencer, who knew he was a thief, but was unwilling
to quarrel with him for the sake of the company, thought that a six
months' vacation in Europe would make for peace and general content.

He had no plans. He was free to wander whithersoever chance led him.
Arriving in London from Plymouth late on a Thursday evening, he took a
bus-driver's holiday on Friday. Finding a tunnel under the Thames in
full progress near the hotel, he sought the resident engineer, spoke
to him in the lingua franca of the craft, and spent several dangerous
and enjoyable hours in crawling through all manner of uncomfortable
passages bored by human worms beneath the bed of the river.

And this was Saturday, and here he was, at three o'clock in the
afternoon, turning over in his mind the best way of sending on an
expensive trip abroad a girl who had not the remotest notion of his
existence. It was a whim, and a harmless one, and he excused it to his
practical mind by the reflection that he was entitled to one day of
extravagance after seven years of hard labor. For his own part, he was
weary of mountains. He had wrought against one, frowning and stubborn
as any Alp, and had not desisted until he reached its very heart with
a four thousand foot lance. Switzerland was the last place in Europe
he would visit. He wanted to see old cities and dim cathedrals, to
lounge in pleasant lands where rivers murmured past lush meadows.
Though an American born and bred, there was a tradition in his home
that the Spencers were once people of note on the border. When tired
of London, he meant to go north, and ramble