to join the celebration. Squint and Maurice Rodaine possessed the
Silver Queen; that they, of all persons, should be the fortunate ones
was bitter and hard to accept. Why should they, of every one in Ohadi,
be the lucky men to find a silver bonanza, that they might flaunt it
before him, that they might increase their standing in the community,
that they might raise themselves to a pedestal in the eyes of every one
and thereby rally about them the whole town in any difficulty which
might arise in the future? It hurt Fairchild, it sickened him. He saw
now that his enemies were more powerful than ever. And for a moment he
almost wished that he had yielded down there in Denver, that he had not
given the ultimatum to the greasy Barnham, that he had accepted the
offer made him,--and gone on, out of the fight forever.

Anita! What would it mean to her? Already engaged, already having
given her answer to Maurice Rodaine, this now would be an added
incentive for her to follow her promise. It would mean a possibility
of further argument with her father, already too weak from illness to
find the means of evading the insidious pleas of the two men who had
taken his money and made him virtually their slave. Could they not
demonstrate to him now that they always had worked for his best
interests? And could not that plea go even farther--to Anita
herself--to persuade her that they were always laboring for her, that
they had striven for this thing that it might mean happiness for her
and for her father? And then, could they not content themselves with
promises, holding before her a rainbow of the far-away, to lead her
into their power, just as they had led the stricken, bedridden man she
called "father"? The future looked black for Robert Fairchild. Slowly
he walked past the happy, shouting crowd and turned up Kentucky Gulch
toward the ill-fated Blue Poppy.

The tunnel opening looked more forlorn than ever when he sighted it, a
bleak, staring, single eye which seemed to brood over its own
misfortunes, a dead, hopeless thing which never had brought anything
but disappointment. A choking came into Fairchild's throat. He
entered the tunnel slowly, ploddingly; with lagging muscles he hauled
up the bucket which told of Harry's presence below, then slowly lowered
himself into the recesses of the shaft and to the drift leading to the
stope, where only a few days before they had found that gaunt,
whitened, haunting thing which