“That’s all right, my friend,” Derby answered.  “Just you wait and see.  Animals never resent kindness, and that’s all these poor creatures are—­just animals.”

In the meantime he and the engineers and the carpenters from Vencata Minore had worked day and night getting up the scaffolding for the first well.  The first boiler was set up in a shanty, and pens were hammered together to hold the molten sulphur.

From the moment of Derby’s arrival in the Vencata mines, the carabinieri kept him under the closest guard and accompanied him wherever he went.  But in spite of this there were a few mild outbreaks.  One day a stone was hurled at him.  Another time some half-crazed wretch tried to stab him; and once a pit was dug across the road, in which his horse broke a leg, so that it had to be shot.  This last nearly brought Derby to the point of meting out punishment to the offenders.  Yet when he realized again the sufferings of these people, his anger gradually subsided.

However, these disturbances had all taken place within the week after his arrival in Sicily, and at the end of the second week he strongly objected to being guarded.  Each day he knew he gained in the confidence of the people, and each day he knew also that they must be improving.  He felt sure that as their bodies were put in something like human condition, their intellects must follow.  The carabinieri protested that he would be making a needless target of himself should he attempt to ride alone in the early dawn from the village of Vencata Minore to the mines.  The road led between rocks and underbrush where a man might hide with perfect safety.  But the apprehension of the carabinieri did not trouble Derby in the least.  “Nonsense,” he said.  “Why, the miners are all beginning to like me—­I can see it in their faces.”

What he said was true, and under the new treatment the people were beginning to look and act like human beings.  Even two weeks were enough to show a settlement beyond Padre Filippo’s highest hopes.  No child was employed in the mines, neither were the women allowed to work outside their huts and plots of ground.  They might dig and plant the soil, but they were barred out of the mines.  With the elimination of the refining vats and the reduction of the scorching heat, and with the presence of moisture from the steam and water required in the new mining, conditions became favorable for luxuriant vegetation.

Besides, Derby had received by cable approval of certain quixotic measures:  Each family was given a milk goat.  The houses were furnished with cook stoves, beds, chairs, and tables.  And although it would be some time before “Little Devil” would seem inappropriate as a name, less than three weeks had passed when Derby, sitting in the tent which served as his office, felt a real thrill as he footed up assets and liabilities.  One well had been sunk, and the boilers and engines needed to operate it were going full blast.  The scaffoldings for two more were nearly up.