“What we goin’ to put our offerings into?” asked the blacksmith, as the boys made ready with their contributions.  “They used to hand around a pie-plate when I was a boy.”

“We’ll try to get along with a hat,” responded Jim, “and Keno here can pass it ’round.  I’ve often observed that a hat is a handy thing to collect things in, especially brains.”

So the hat went quickly from one to another, sagging more and more in the crown as it travelled.

The men had come forward to surround the anvil, with the tiny little chap upon its massive top, and not one in all the groups was there who did not feel that, left alone with the timid bit of a pilgrim, he could get him to talking and laughing in the briefest of moments.

The hymns with which old Jim had promised the meeting should conclude were all but forgotten.  Two or three miners, whose hunger for song was not to be readily appeased, kept bringing the subject to the fore again, however, till at length they were heard.

“We’re scarin’ little Skeezucks, anyhow,” said the brawny smith, once more reviving the fire in the forge.

“Let’s sing ‘In the Sweet By-and-By,’ if all of us know it,” suggested a young fellow scarcely more than a lad.  “It’s awful easy.”

“Wal, you start her bilin’,” replied the teamster.

The young fellow blushed, but he nerved himself to the point and sang out, nervously at first, and then, when his confidence increased, in a clear, ringing tenor of remarkable purity, recalling the old-time words that once were so widely known and treasured: 

  “’There’s a land that is fairer than day,
    And by faith we can see it afar,
  For the Father waits over the way
    To prepare us a dwelling-place there.’”

Then the chorus of voices, husky from neglect and crude from lack of culture, joined in the chorus, with a heartiness that shook the dingy building: 

  “’In the sweet by-and-by,
    We shall meet on that beautiful shore;
  In the sweet by-and-by,
    We shall meet on that beautiful shore.’”

They followed this with what they knew of “Home, Sweet Home,” and so at last strolled out into the sunshine of the street, and surrounded the quaint little foundling, as he looked from one to another in baby gravity and sat in his timid way on the arm of “Bruvver Jim.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said the blacksmith, “now that we’ve found that we can do the job all right, we’ll get up a Christmas for little Skeezucks that will lift the mountains clean up off the earth!”

“Good suggestion,” Jim agreed.  “But the little feller feels tired now.  I am goin’ to take him home.”

And this he did.  But after lunch no fewer than twenty of the men of Borealis climbed up the trail to get another look at the quiet little man who glorified the cabin.

But the darkness had only begun to creep through the lowermost channels of the canyons when Skeezucks fell asleep.  By then old Jim, the pup, and Keno were alone with the child.