familiar points at once.  Here was Cold canyon, where invariably, winter and summer, a chilly wind was blowing; here was where the road to Spencer’s branched off; here was Bussy’s old place, where at one time there were so many dogs; here was Delmue’s cabin, where unlicensed whiskey used to be sold; here was the plank bridge with its one rotten board; and here the flat overgrown with manzanita, where he once had shot three quail.

At noon, after he had been tramping for some two hours, he halted at a point where the road dipped suddenly.  A little to the right of him, and flanking the road, an enormous yellow gravel-pit like an emptied lake gaped to heaven.  Farther on, in the distance, a canyon zigzagged toward the horizon, rugged with pine-clad mountain crests.  Nearer at hand, and directly in the line of the road, was an irregular cluster of unpainted cabins.  A dull, prolonged roar vibrated in the air.  McTeague nodded his head as if satisfied.

“That’s the place,” he muttered.

He reshouldered his blanket roll and descended the road.  At last he halted again.  He stood before a low one-story building, differing from the others in that it was painted.  A verandah, shut in with mosquito netting, surrounded it.  McTeague dropped his blanket roll on a lumber pile outside, and came up and knocked at the open door.  Some one called to him to come in.

McTeague entered, rolling his eyes about him, noting the changes that had been made since he had last seen this place.  A partition had been knocked down, making one big room out of the two former small ones.  A counter and railing stood inside the door.  There was a telephone on the wall.  In one corner he also observed a stack of surveyor’s instruments; a big drawing-board straddled on spindle legs across one end of the room, a mechanical drawing of some kind, no doubt the plan of the mine, unrolled upon it; a chromo representing a couple of peasants in a ploughed field (Millet’s “Angelus”) was nailed unframed upon the wall, and hanging from the same wire nail that secured one of its corners in place was a bullion bag and a cartridge belt with a loaded revolver in the pouch.

The dentist approached the counter and leaned his elbows upon it.  Three men were in the room—­a tall, lean young man, with a thick head of hair surprisingly gray, who was playing with a half-grown great Dane puppy; another fellow about as young, but with a jaw almost as salient as McTeague’s, stood at the letter-press taking a copy of a letter; a third man, a little older than the other two, was pottering over a transit.  This latter was massively built, and wore overalls and low boots streaked and stained and spotted in every direction with gray mud.  The dentist looked slowly from one to the other; then at length, “Is the foreman about?” he asked.

The man in the muddy overalls came forward.

“What you want?”

He spoke with a strong German accent.