he barber shop, and over in Smith's Hotel they had
three extra barkeepers working on the lager beer pumps.

They were selling mining shares on the Main Street in Mariposa that
afternoon and people were just clutching for them. Then at night there
was a big oyster supper in Smith's caff, with speeches, and the Mariposa
band outside.

And the queer thing was that the very next afternoon was the funeral
of young Fizzlechip, and Dean Drone had to change the whole text of
his Sunday sermon at two days' notice for fear of offending public
sentiment.

But I think what Jeff liked best of it all was the sort of public
recognition that it meant. He'd stand there in the shop, hardly
bothering to shave, and explain to the men in the arm-chairs how he held
her, and they shoved her, and he clung to her, and what he'd said to
himself--a perfect Iliad--while he was clinging to her.

The whole thing was in the city papers a few days after with a
photograph of Jeff, taken specially at Ed Moore's studio (upstairs over
Netley's). It showed Jeff sitting among palm trees, as all mining men
do, with one hand on his knee, and a dog, one of those regular mining
dogs, at his feet, and a look of piercing intelligence in his face that
would easily account for forty thousand dollars.

I say that the recognition meant a lot to Jeff for its own sake. But no
doubt the fortune meant quite a bit to him too on account of Myra.

Did I mention Myra, Jeff's daughter? Perhaps not. That's the
trouble with the people in Mariposa; they're all so separate and so
different--not a bit like the people in the cities--that unless you hear
about them separately and one by one you can't for a moment understand
what they're like.

Myra had golden hair and a Greek face and would come bursting through
the barber shop in a hat at least six inches wider than what they
wear in Paris. As you saw her swinging up the street to the Telephone
Exchange in a suit that was straight out of the Delineator and brown
American boots, there was style written all over her,--the kind of
thing that Mariposa recognised and did homage to. And to see her in the
Exchange,--she was one of the four girls that I spoke of,--on her high
stool with a steel cap on,--jabbing the connecting plugs in and out
as if electricity cost nothing--well, all I mean is that you could
understand why it was that the commercial travellers would stand round
in the Exchange calling up all sorts of impossible vil