ams escorted Hope out into the cab of the
locomotive, and taught her how to increase and slacken the speed of the
engine, until she showed an unruly desire to throw the lever open
altogether and shoot them off the rails into the ocean beyond.

Clay sat at the back of the car with Miss Langham, and told her and her
father of the difficulties with which young MacWilliams had had to
contend. Miss Langham found her chief pleasure in noting the attention
which her father gave to all that Clay had to tell him. Knowing her
father as she did, and being familiar with his manner toward other men,
she knew that he was treating Clay with unusual consideration. And
this pleased her greatly, for it justified her own interest in him.
She regarded Clay as a discovery of her own, but she was glad to have
her opinion of him shared by others.

Their coming was a great event in the history of the mines. Kirkland,
the foreman, and Chapman, who handled the dynamite, Weimer, the Consul,
and the native doctor, who cared for the fever-stricken and the
casualties, were all at the station to meet them in the whitest of
white duck and with a bunch of ponies to carry them on their tour of
inspection, and the village of mud-cabins and zinc-huts that stood
clear of the bare sunbaked earth on whitewashed wooden piles was as
clean as Clay's hundred policemen could sweep it. Mr. Langham rode in
advance of the cavalcade, and the head of each of the different
departments took his turn in riding at his side, and explained what had
been done, and showed him the proud result. The village was empty,
except for the families of the native workmen and the ownerless dogs,
the scavengers of the colony, that snarled and barked and ran leaping
in front of the ponies' heads.

Rising abruptly above the zinc village, lay the first of the five great
hills, with its open front cut into great terraces, on which the men
clung like flies on the side of a wall, some of them in groups around
an opening, or in couples pounding a steel bar that a fellow-workman
turned in his bare hands, while others gathered about the panting
steam-drills that shook the solid rock with fierce, short blows, and
hid the men about them in a throbbing curtain of steam. Self-important
little dummy-engines, dragging long trains of ore-cars, rolled and
rocked on the uneven surface of the ground, and swung around corners
with warning screeches of their whistles. They could see, on peaks
outli