Raw dumps and grass-covered dumps are traceable on every hand, and though the older tunnels are obliterated, there are still enough shafts and drifts and adits to be found in the gray stone hills to occupy many months' exploration.
George Carter had heard of the past glories of lead from his earliest years, and old residents pointed to the ruined cottages that were filled and flourishing when the village held 500 people who lived by the mines, instead of the 200 who dwelt there now and made a lean living out of a little limp farming. With pockets stuffed with candle-ends he had splashed into the old levels and wandered for miles in the heart of the limestone hills and hacked with rusty pickheads at forgotten working faces; he had raked amongst the old ruined machinery beside the dumps; he had studied the run of the water races, and as far as a man with a natural engineering bent may reconstruct these things from memorials of the past, he had done so most thoroughly, and, in the old unscientific way, was as good a miner as any of those blue-gummed ruffians of the past, and that without even having seen a lead mine in real work.
Tin-stone he had seen in a not very well-equipped school museum; a tin mine he knew only from an old book on Cornwall, which treated that country more from the picturesque point of view than the mechanical or the scientific.
But the thing that had fired his mind one baking day at Malla-Nulla was a newspaper paragraph which spoke of the price of tin. Up till then, like the majority of the human race, he had not troubled his head as to whether tin was £5 a ton or £50. But here he saw that it had gone up to no less a figure than £207 10s. per ton. He wished he could find a tin mine, but concluding he might as well search that particular part of steamy West Africa for great auk's eggs, went no further than framing the wish.
Then came the happenings at Mokki, and Ali ben Hossein's parting gift of the little gray stone duck which had unmistakable brown tin crystals for its head, its wings and its feet, and on the top of all arrived Kate's cablegram. A sweating operator had read that message from under sea, as it winked out in a darkened cable hut; runners had carried the curt words along roaring beaches, paddlers had borne them by canoe up muddy creeks, a great bank in far-off Hamburg had pledged the performance of their promise. A day later the slatternly S.S. Frau Pobst lurched untidily up the muddy creeks, and commenced to ease the factory buildings of their overflowing wealth of West African produce.
Carter itched to be off. It had come to this; he could not trust himself in Kate's neighborhood. Laura Slade saw, or fancied she saw how things were, and bravely asked him one day to break their engagement.
But Carter drew her down onto the office chair beside him and put an arm round her and kissed her. "Now," he said, "tell out frankly who it is that you like better than you like me?"
"It isn't that, George."
"Well, as Cascaes is the only alternative, I didn't suppose it was. Come now, out with it, what's the trouble? I suppose you're just going to be a woman and tell me it's my fault? I don't agree with you. I'm the same me as always was—red hair, large feet, and as big an appetite as the Coast will allow."
She put her face against his shoulder. "It's Kate, George."