Next to Jim, he loved Tintoretto—that joyous, irresponsible bit of pup-wise gladness whose tail was so utterly inadequate to express his enthusiasm that he wagged his whole fuzzy self in the manner of an awkward fish. Never was the tiny man seated with his doll on the floor that the pup failed to pounce upon him and push him over, half a dozen times. Never did this happen that one of the men, or Jim himself, did not at once haul Tintoretto, growling, away by the tail or the ear and restore their tiny guest to his upright position. Never did such a good Samaritan fail to raise his hand for a cuff at the pup, nor ever did one of them actually strike. It ended nearly always in the pup's attack on the hand in question, which he chewed and pawed at and otherwise befriended as only a pup, in his freedom from worries and cares, can do.
With absolutely nothing prepared, and with nothing but promises made and forgotten, old Jim beheld the glory of Sunday morning come, with the bite and crystalline sunshine of the season in the mountain air.
God's thoughts must be made in Nevada, so lofty and flawless is the azure sky, so utterly transparent is the atmosphere, so huge, gray, and passionless the mighty reach of mountains!
Man's little thought was expressed in the camp of Borealis, which appeared like a herd of small, brown houses, pitifully insignificant in all that immensity, and gathered together as if for company, trustfully nestling in the hand of the earth-mother, known to be so gentle with her children. On the hill-sides, smaller mining houses stood, each one emphasized by the blue-gray heap of earth and granite—the dump—formed by the labors of the restless men who burrowed in the rock for precious metal. The road, which seemed to have no ending-place, was blazed through the brush and through the hills in either direction across the miles and miles of this land without a people. The houses of Borealis stood to right and left of this path through the wilderness, as if by common consent to let it through.
Meagre, unknown, unimportant Borealis, with her threescore men and one decent woman, shared, like the weightiest empire, in the smile, the care, the yearning of the ever All-Pitiful, greeting the earth with another perfect day.
Intelligence of what could be expected, in the way of a celebration at the blacksmith-shop of Webber, had been more than merely spread; it had almost been flooded over town. Long before the hour of ten, scheduled by common consent for church to commence, Webber was sweeping sundry parings of horse-hoof and scraps of iron to either side of his hard earth floor, and sprinkling the dust with water that he flirted from his barrel. He likewise wiped off the anvil with his leathern apron, and making a fire in the forge to take off the chill, thrust in a huge hunk of iron to irradiate the heat.
Many of the denizens of Borealis came and laid siege to the barber-shop as early as six in the morning. Hardly a man in the place, except Parky, the gambler, had been dressed in extravagance so imposing since the 4th of July as was early apparent in the street. Bright new shirts, red, blue, and even white, came proudly to the front. Trousers were dropped outside of boots, and the boots themselves were polished. A run on bear's-grease and hair-oil lent a shining halo to nearly every head the camp could boast. Then the groups began to gather near the open shop of the smith.
"We'd ought to have a bell," suggested Lufkins, the teamster. "Churches always ring the bell to let the parson know it's time he was showin' up to start the ball."
"Well, I'll string up a bar of steel," said Webber. "You can get a crackin' fine lot of noise out of that."
He strung it up in a framework just outside the door, ordinarily employed for hoisting heavy wagons from the earth. Then with a hammer he struck it sharply.