“I have seen that trail of smoke up there before.  Where does it come from?” she said languidly, pointing to a distant film of vapour that drifted in a faint blue wreath along the slope of a hill.

“That,” said Alton, “is the Tyee mine.”

“I have heard of it.  They find silver there?”

“Yes,” said Alton dryly.  “They find a little.”

“There is silver in those mountains, then?” said Miss Deringham.

Alton nodded.  “Lots of it.  Still, it costs a good deal to get out, and then it doesn’t pay for the mining occasionally.  That’s the trouble with the Tyee.”

“Still, it must pay somebody, or they would not go on,” said Miss Deringham.

Alton laughed a little.  “Oh, yes,” he said dryly.  “It pays a man called Hallam and some others of his kind who got up the company.  Still, sometime and somehow, I think he will be sorry he stole poor folks’ money.”

“You,” said Miss Deringham, smiling, “are an optimist, then?”

Alton gravely glanced about him, and the girl fancied she understood him as she followed his gaze from snowpeak down the great pine-shrouded hillside to the river frothing in the valley.  “I don’t know, but one feels there’s something beyond all that,” he said.  “It didn’t come there by accident, and it has all its work to do.  Sun and frost and sliding snow grinding up the hillside very sure and slow, and the river sweeping what it gets from them way down the valley to spread new wheatfields out into the sea.”

“But,” said Miss Deringham, smiling, “we are speaking of men, and I don’t quite see the connection.”

“Well,” said Alton, “they have their place in the great machine too, and must work like the rest, and do something to make it more fruitful, in return for the food the good earth gives them.”

“A good many men don’t seem to realize the obligation,” said Miss Deringham.

Alton nodded.  “No, but I can’t help thinking they’ll be dealt with somehow.  They’re just stealing from the others.”

“You are a socialist, then?”

“No,” said Alton, “I don’t think I am.  It seems to me that every man is entitled to all the dollars he can get by working for them honestly, and there’s a place somewhere in this great world for him, if he has the grit to get up and look for it as he was meant to do, but it has no use for the man who wants to sit still and think about his dinner while other folks work for him.”

“Still, he may have earned the right to do so,” said the girl.

“Well,” said Alton grimly, “most of that kind I’ve met with seemed to have stolen it, and one or two of them had, for a few thousand dollars, sent good men to their death.  When you’ve seen your comrades sickening and starving on rotten provisions in the snow, or washed out down the valley by the bursting of a dam that was only built to sell, you begin to wonder whether it would be wrong to wipe out some of that crowd with the rifle.”