"Look!" I shouted as some small animals leaped across the trail. "A chiffon!"
"A what?" He would not even look.
"A chiffon. It's a sort of four-legged burrowing bird which inhabits mines. We must be near the Throne."
Black clumps of torch-like pines scattered down, far down a slope of Alpine flowers on which we groped. Ahead was a spire peak of pansy bloom on a field of lilac snow against the gloaming. Astern and a little above our trail a small log cabin nestled among the rocks, and a candle glowed in its doorway. Then ahead, quite near, a nook of the hillside revealed more cabins in the frosty murk. A lamp gleamed in a window, to guide us up the rock steps and fields of dusty snow. Here was the Throne.
CHAPTER IX
THE SACRIFICE
I
Observe, ere we come to the Throne Mine, these various points of view:
Mr. Otto Rams. His point of view revealed to him a stony broke inventor by the name of Burrows, to be smoothly cheated out of certain patents for extracting gold from rock. This was a perfectly legitimate business proposition.
Doctor Eliphalet P. Burrows, alias Loco. His point of view was this: that after thirty years of despairing effort he had discovered, hooked, played and landed an important mining engineer representing capital, in whose rays he was now prepared to lie on his back with all four paws up and pant.