en you're ready to talk on a square basis, come back, and we'll use
the ink. Until then we won't. We might as well shut down, first as
last, as to lose money when we're just breakin' even as it is. Think
it over a while, and see if we ain't right."

"Well, you'll hear from me," declared the delegate, as he put his hat
on his head and turned out of the door without any parting courtesy.
"Keep the card. My name's Thompson, you know."

For a full minute after he had gone, the partners stared at each other
with troubled faces.

"Oh, he's a bluff! That's all there is to it," asserted Mathews,
reaching into the corner for his rubber boots, preparatory to going
underground. "He knows it ain't right, just as well as I do. If he can
put this over, all right. If he can't he'll give us the other
rating."

He left Dick making up a time-roll, and turned down the hill; and they
did not discuss it again until they were alone that night.

It was seven o'clock the next evening when the partners observed an
unusual stir in the camp. They came into the mess-house to find that
the men had eaten in unusually short order; and from the bench
outside, usually filled at that hour with laughing loungers, there was
not a sound. A strange stillness had invaded the colony of the Croix
d'Or, almost ominous. Preoccupied, and each thinking over his
individual trials, the partners ate their food and arose from the
table. Out on the doorstep they paused to look down the canyon, now
shorn of ugliness and rendered beautiful by the purple twilight. The
faint haze of smoke from the banked fires, rising above the steel
chimney of the boiler-house, was the only stirring, living spectacle
visible; save one.

"What does that mean?" Bill drawled, as if speaking to himself.

Far below, just turning the bend of the road, Dick saw a procession of
men, grouped, or walking in pairs. They disappeared before he
answered.

"Looks like the boys," he said, using the term of the camps for all
men employed. "I wonder where they are bound for? If it were pay
night, I could understand. It would mean Goldpan, the dance halls, a
fight or two, and sore heads to-morrow; but to-night--I don't know."

Bill did not answer. He seemed to be in a silent, contemplative mood
when they sat in the rough easy-chairs on the porch in front of the
office and looked up at the first rays of light on the splendid,
rugged peak above. Dick's mind reverted to the lumberman's daughter,
as