Little forms passed by him with faces wizened and wrinkled—­were they gnomes?—­or what?  Surely not children!  Small, narrow, stooped shoulders, backs bent under loads buckled to tottering legs.  Ragged the creatures were to the point of nakedness, and on their arms and legs were scars fresh and scarlet from the torches of the overseers.  Women and men crawled near the caldrons, and down the ladders into the hell pits went the children—­up with the heavy loads past the torch and lash of the devil servers, whose duty it was to see that no panting being loitered.  Day in, day out, these miserable wretches stumbled under the stinging pain of burning flesh—­and once in a while a child’s faltering feet slipped from the ladder rungs, his weak hands lost hold—­a cry, a fall, and the “Golden Plenty” had swallowed one more victim.

As Derby’s party drew near, a straggling group gathered around the strangers.  They stared dully and without intelligence, and yet like animals in whom savagery is ever ready to burst restraints.  The stronger men among them glowered at the intruders, turning against a strange face with the snarl they dared not show to one grown familiar.  Beyond the mines, ranged at different heights on the barren mountain slope, were huts much like the abandoned ones at “Little Devil”—­black caverns, smoke-stained and gaping, where stooping human beings moved in and out, maimed and broken like insects whose wings some brutal boy has pulled.

And yet the priest affirmed that to get half a dozen families to leave this place and go to the new settlement would be no easy task.  They were too dull to grasp the promise of betterment, and the very mention of “Little Devil” filled them with alarm.  It would need many days and much patient handling to convince them that the forestieri meant them good instead of harm.

Padre Filippo was the one who most persuaded them—­he and a Sicilian workman, a native of Vencata who had lately returned from America.  Between these two the miners’ fears were partly allayed, and in less than a week’s time Derby received a small company of men, women, and children into his new settlement.  They came like prisoners, under the guard of the carabinieri, and so feeble and debilitated were the wretched creatures that, for a few weeks after their arrival, Derby turned his settlement into a hospital.

Yet suspicion surrounded him on every side.  It was one of the carabinieri—­the taller one—­who ventured his opinions one day:  “Signore does not know these people!  Signore is letting them grow strong that they may the better use their fangs.  They cannot believe that Signore is not the devil in paying such wages—­in pretending to give them a life of ease.  The great Duke Scorpa is their friend—­he has been able to do nothing.  The good and honorable His Eminence the Archbishop, not even he may help—­none in this world; not even the Holy Virgin on her throne in heaven.  If any one comes to interfere it must be the devil—­since none but the devil comes to such a land.”