Well, and what does this old snow-scene-in-the-Alps do after about a year but mush along up the canon past Mullan and find a high-grade proposition so rich it was scandalous!  They didn’t know how rich at first, of course, but Angus got assays and they looked so good they must be a mistake, so they sunk a shaft and drifted in a tunnel, and the assays got better, and people with money was pretty soon taking notice.

“One day Snowstorm come grouching down to Angus and tells about a capitalist that had brought two experts with him and nosed over the workings for three days.  Snowstorm was awful dejected.  He had hated the capitalist right off.  ’He wears a gold watch chain and silk underclothes like one of these fly city dames,’ says Snowstorm, who was a knowing old scoundrel, ’and he says his syndicate on the reports of these two thieving experts will pay twelve hundred for it and not a cent more.  What do you think of that for nerve?’

“‘Is that all?’ says Angus, working away at his job in the new International Hotel at Wallace.  Graining a door in the dining-room he was, with a ham rind and a stocking over one thumb nail, doing little curlicues in the brown wet paint to make it look like what the wood was at first before it was painted at all.  ‘Well,’ he says, ’I suspected from the assays that we might get a bit more, but if he had experts with him you better let him have it for twelve hundred.  After all, twelve hundred dollars is a good bit of money.’

“‘Twelve hundred thousand,’ says Snowstorm, still grouchy.

“‘Oh,’ says Angus.  ’In that case don’t let him have it.  If the shark offers that it’ll be worth more.  I’ll go into the mining business myself as soon as I’ve done this door and the wainscoting and give them their varnish.’

“He did so.  He had the International finished in three more days, turned down a job in the new bank building cold, and went into the mining business just like he’d do anything else—­slow and sure, yet impetuous here and there.  It wasn’t a hard proposition, the stuff being there nearly from the grass roots, and the money soon come a-plenty.  Snowstorm not only got things trimmed up but had ’em dyed black as a crow’s wing and retired to a life of sinful ease in Spokane, eating bacon and beans and cocoanut custard pie three times a day till the doctors found out what a lot of expensive things he had the matter with him.

“Angus not only kept on the job but branched out into other mines that he bought up, and pretty soon he quit counting his money.  You know what that would mean to most of his race.  It fazed him a mite at first.  He tried faithfully to act like a crazy fool with his money, experimenting with revelry and champagne for breakfast, and buying up the Sans Soosy dance hall every Saturday night for his friends and admirers.  But he wasn’t gaited to go on that track long.  Even Ellabelle wasn’t worried the least bit, and in fact she thought something of the kind was due his position.  And she was busy herself buying the things that are champagne to a woman, only they’re kept on the outside.  That was when Angus told her if she was going in for diamonds at all to get enough so she could appear to be wasteful and contemptuous of them.  Two thousand she give for one little diamond circlet to pin her napkin up on her chest with.  It was her own idea.