As soon as his belongings were unpacked, Porter, with an eye for beauty as well as a view to making himself popular, began to draw a pencil sketch of the little Marcella, a witch of five and beautiful as a doll.  Tiggs and Jenkins saw to the unloading of the mules.  But Derby and the carabinieri, with Padre Filippo, after a hasty luncheon of bread, figs, and goats’ milk, pushed on to the mines.  Beyond the outskirts of the little village the land soon grew dead again—­not a bird fluttered, not a living thing was heard.  A few patches of green had sprouted here and there in the lava blackness of the soil, but otherwise the country seemed under a curse.

A new bend in the road brought them close to a small abandoned settlement whose windowless houses gaped, staring like lidless eyes, at the pits which had been dug and left like caverns of the dead—­as, in truth, they were.  Yet nature had softened the graveyard with straggling spots of new green.  A vapor rose from one of the pits as though a monster lay in wait below to destroy his victims with the poison of his breath.  This was “Little Devil,” the priest told Derby.  Through the jaws of that yawning hole many had entered the gates of paradise!  His lips muttered a fragment of the prayer for the dead; he crossed himself, and Derby noticed that the carabinieri did the same.

During the day Derby had been slowly unfolding to Padre Filippo his plans, and now the priest looked anxiously into the American’s face—­could he still be hopeful of such a cemetery as this?  Derby rode slowly, making a cursory survey of the conditions.  It was much as he had expected to find it, he told the priest; he was not disheartened.

They did not stop, as Derby was anxious to go to the Scorpa mines, where he expected to secure his men.  He had heard enough to know what lay before him; and even in anticipation he felt oppressed.  Another sudden turn in the road gave them a near view of the settlement.  Over the arid earth spread a dense haze of smoke and yellow vapor, and down in it—­in this vapor whose metallic fumes gripped lungs and throat and burned like fire—­crawled human beings!  Close to the earth they crept, so that the rising smoke might spend its worst above them.

Derby had thought himself prepared, but with the horrors actually before him, he shuddered uncontrollably; unconsciously, he gripped the pommel of the saddle so tensely that his knuckles whitened.  The mine of “Golden Plenty!” From the horrible mockery of the name, the devil might well have taken notes in planning hell!  Copper Rock was paradise indeed, compared to this inferno.