they
gnomes?--or what? Surely not children! Small, narrow, stooped shoulders,
backs bent under loads buckled to tottering legs. Ragged the creatures
were to the point of nakedness, and on their arms and legs were scars
fresh and scarlet from the torches of the overseers. Women and men
crawled near the caldrons, and down the ladders into the hell pits went
the children--up with the heavy loads past the torch and lash of the
devil servers, whose duty it was to see that no panting being loitered.
Day in, day out, these miserable wretches stumbled under the stinging
pain of burning flesh--and once in a while a child's faltering feet
slipped from the ladder rungs, his weak hands lost hold--a cry, a fall,
and the "Golden Plenty" had swallowed one more victim.

As Derby's party drew near, a straggling group gathered around the
strangers. They stared dully and without intelligence, and yet like
animals in whom savagery is ever ready to burst restraints. The stronger
men among them glowered at the intruders, turning against a strange face
with the snarl they dared not show to one grown familiar. Beyond the
mines, ranged at different heights on the barren mountain slope, were
huts much like the abandoned ones at "Little Devil"--black caverns,
smoke-stained and gaping, where stooping human beings moved in and out,
maimed and broken like insects whose wings some brutal boy has pulled.

And yet the priest affirmed that to get half a dozen families to leave
this place and go to the new settlement would be no easy task. They were
too dull to grasp the promise of betterment, and the very mention of
"Little Devil" filled them with alarm. It would need many days and much
patient handling to convince them that the _forestieri_ meant them good
instead of harm.

Padre Filippo was the one who most persuaded them--he and a Sicilian
workman, a native of Vencata who had lately returned from America.
Between these two the miners' fears were partly allayed, and in less
than a week's time Derby received a small company of men, women, and
children into his new settlement. They came like prisoners, under the
guard of the _carabinieri_, and so feeble and debilitated were the
wretched creatures that, for a few weeks after their arrival, Derby
turned his settlement into a hospital.

Yet suspicion surrounded him on every side. It was one of the
_carabinieri_--the taller one--who ventured his opinions one day:
"Signore does not know these people! Sig