He dropped over the lower hills, and the voice of the gold town rose to him.  It was a murmur like that of an army preparing for battle.  Now and then a blast exploded, for what purpose he could not imagine in this school of mining.  But as a rule the sounds were subdued by the distance.  He caught the muttering of many voices, in which laughter and shouts were brought to the level of a whisper at close hand; and through all this there was a persistent clangor of metallic sounds.  No doubt from the blacksmith shops where picks and other implements were made or sharpened and all sorts of repairing carried on.  But the predominant tone of the voice of The Corner was this persistent ringing of metal.  It suggested to Donnegan that here was a town filled with men of iron and all the gentler parts of their natures forgotten.  An odd place to bring such a woman as Lou Macon, surely!

He reached the level, and entered the town.

11

Hunting for news, he went naturally to the news emporium which took the place of the daily paper—­namely, he went to the saloons.  But on the way he ran through a liberal cross-section of The Corner’s populace.  First of all, the tents and the ruder shacks.  He saw little sheet-iron stoves with the tin dishes piled, unwashed, upon the tops of them when the miners rushed back to their work; broken handles of picks and shovels; worn-out shirts and overalls lay where they had been tossed; here was a flat strip of canvas supported by four four-foot poles and without shelter at the sides, and the belongings of one careless miner tumbled beneath this miserable shelter; another man had striven for some semblance of a home and he had framed a five-foot walk leading up to the closed flap of his tent with stones of a regular size.  But nowhere was there a sign of life, and would not be until semidarkness brought the unwilling workers back to the tents.

Out of this district he passed quickly onto the main street, and here there was a different atmosphere.  The first thing he saw was a man dressed as a cowpuncher from belt to spurs—­spurs on a miner—­but above the waist he blossomed in a frock coat and a silk hat.  Around the coat he had fastened his belt, and the shirt beneath the coat was common flannel, open at the throat.  He walked, or rather staggered, on the arm of an equally strange companion who was arrayed in a white silk shirt, white flannel trousers, white dancing pumps, and a vast sombrero!  But as if this was not sufficient protection for his head, he carried a parasol of the most brilliant green silk and twirled it above his head.  The two held a wavering course and went blindly past Donnegan.

It was sufficiently clear that the storekeeper had followed the gold.