Grace looked at him with a flashing eye, and there was ineffable scorn in her voice as she said,
"My brother is not a fortune-hunter, nor did he feel impelled to ask Miss Planter to say her prayers."
Then she turned and addressed Pierce Caldwell on her other side.
She avoided Mr. Bloxsome as far as possible during the remainder of the evening.
CHAPTER XX
The next day, when another slight fall of snow in the night had been frozen as hard as the surface of a wedding-cake over all the roads in the district, Mordaunt was driven by Pierce Caldwell in his sleigh up the beautiful drive his father had made along the mountain-side to the mouth of the mine. Here he passed some hours in examining all the processes of silver-milling, and the many improvements, due to Pierce's energy, which had been effected in the works since the day they were established. He descended the mine by a new shaft opened a few days previously, which had been sunk several hundred feet, and which had laid bare fresh veins of ore, richer, apparently, than any which had yet been worked. Mordaunt's enthusiasm rose to fever pitch. When he had returned to the earth's surface, he gasped,
"By Jove! Caldwell—this is the biggest thing out. You're a lucky chap—no! I suppose I oughtn't to say that. How few young chaps would have been able to do what you have done! It is splendid—it really is!"
"Oh! it's no merit of mine. I have done nothing except just stick to the business, and watch, and let nothing slip. It is desperately interesting, I can tell you. And then the boys—they're a rough lot, but such good fellows! I'm fond of them all, and they'd go to—well! anywhere for me, I believe. This is the reading-room I've built for them."
The "boys" were men, some well over fifty, begrimed with dirt, and many, it must be confessed, of forbidding aspect. The stories Mordaunt had been told of shots fired at random in saloons and drinking bars gained in probability as he looked at them. Indeed, Pierce confirmed them from his own experiences as a youth, when he remembered, in a saloon, having to throw himself flat on the ground "to prevent stopping the balls," and the floor was strewn subsequently with wounded men. He repeated an anecdote of lynch law in those not-far-distant days, as he heard it, in the words of the narrator, "which," he continued with a laugh, "I think are characteristically succinct. The fellow was telling me how their camp had suffered by the robbery of horses, and he added, 'But I tell you, sir, that we collared a man the other day, owning a horse that didn't belong to him. The next thing that man found was that his legs were not touching the ground!'"
Mordaunt laughed heartily at this graphic euphemism, and then said,