"Oh-ho," said the girl, who also heard, "we are taking you for granted, aren't we?" Steering only smiled at her again. He had fallen into the habit of smiling at her, and some prescience seemed to urge him to exercise the habit while he could.
Madeira was turning from the man on the curb: "All right, I'll allot you one thousand shares, eh? Good-day.—Pet, you'd better drive on out to Chitwood, lickety-split."
Miss Madeira put the whip to her horses, and they left the Joplin streets behind them, and sped out a gritty white road that crossed a lean sweep of prairie. Ahead of them Steering could see presently a sort of settlement; wooden sheds, wide and low; hoister shafts, tall and slim, on stilts; scaffolding; pipes; chimneys; tramways; surface railways. His eyes leaped from moundlike piles of tailings, the powdery crush spit out by the concentrating mills, to boulder-like heaps of rocks that had been wheeled away to save the teeth of the mills, and his ears turned distraught from the groaning clank of unwieldy iron tubs, swinging up through skeleton shafts, to the sputtering plunk-plunk of drill engines and the booming roar of machinery.
"Hard to keep up with, eh? God bless us, it certainly is hard to keep up with!" cried Madeira. "Drive into the enclosure there at the Howdy-do, Pet, Throcker will be expecting us. I telephoned him. Yes, sir, this is the place to see what zinc means." Madeira was leaning forward again, one arm about his daughter and the other arm fathering Steering. "This is the place to understand what can be done by seeing what has been done." He seemed to want to fire Steering with the idea that just such another astounding development could be wrought out down there in the Canaan Tigmores, and though Steering was aware that he would soon be at a crisis where he would need an austere strength of judgment, uncoloured by enthusiasm of any kind, he could not help responding to the aura of enthusiasm into which he was entering. The great plant of the Howdy-do mine disseminated enthusiasm in shaking vibrations. Milled enthusiasm stood about in cars, ready for the smelters. Enthusiasm roared and whirred from the concentrating mill where wheels were turning and bands were slipping; where a tub, ore-laden, was jerking and clanking through the hoister shaft; where men on an upper platform were shovelling the dump from the tub into great crusher rolls; where the rolls were grinding and pounding, and the water was fashing and gurgling down the jigs. The whirr of it all, the whizz and bang of it, the whole effect of it all, was, to any man interested in the development of ore, a great forward impetus that swung him far out, limp and dizzy.
"Waiting for you, Mr. Madeira!" cried a man, who fairly shone with enthusiasm, and whose voice tinkled gladly as he came across to the hitching rail where Miss Madeira had stopped her horses. "Mighty glad to see you, Miss Sally—Mr. Steering, glad to meet you, sir. Here you, Mike! come and look after these horses. Miss Sally, I'm a-going to have to take you round to the tool-house for some covers, please ma'am." The accommodating and friendly mine-boss of the Howdy-do led Madeira's party to a shed opposite his mill and there outfitted them with rubber coats and caps, talking to them all the while in that tinkling voice, with the glad note singing in it.
"God bless my soul, Throcker, how much did the last blast bring down?" Madeira turned to Steering before Throcker could reply. "Whenever a miner's voice shakes and sings like that, his last blast has meant a heap."
"You are right, sir!" cried Throcker, "we opened up a face yesterday that,—well, it's going to take us weeks to handle even the loose ore we've brought down, sir. Come this way, Miss Sally, please ma'am."
Steering began to wish that the mine-boss were not so happy. It had an electric effect upon him. And he began to wish that he himself were not so happy. He dreaded developments that would surely be change.
"Well, Throcker, my boy, my ledge of Cherokee runs up here from the Canaan Tigmores, d'you know that?" said Madeira. He put his thumbs in his pockets and rocked upon the balls of his feet with a springing, tip-toe movement, as Throcker stopped them in front of a shaft out of whose cavernous depths a cage was swinging toward them. From Madeira's manner you might have inferred that the Cherokee had a Madeira permit to "run up here."
In the cage it was necessary for Steering to extend his arm behind Miss Madeira, as there were no sides between the great cables at the four corners. It was not a very large cage and the number on it crowded it, so that the girl rested lightly on Steering's arm. He could think of no place so deep down that he would not be well satisfied to journey to it like that.