“Yes, I reckon yours is the cleanest house, because it’s the newest, so you’ll just step out and let us knock in one o’ the gables, and clap it on to the saloon, and make one house of it, don’t you see?  There’ll be two rooms, one for the girls and the other for the old man.”

The astonishment and bewilderment of the party had gradually given way to a boyish and impatient interest.

“Hadn’t we better do the job at once?” suggested Dick Mattingly.

“Or throw ourselves into those new clothes, so as to be ready,” added the younger Kearney, looking down at his ragged trousers.  “I say, Fairfax, what are the girls like, eh?”

All the others had been dying to ask the question, yet one and all laughed at the conscious manner and blushing cheek of the questioner.

“You’ll find out quick enough,” returned Fairfax, whose curt carelessness did not, however, prevent a slight increase of color on his own cheek.  “We’d better get that job off our hands before doing anything else.  So, if you’re ready, boys, we’ll just waltz down to Thompson’s and pack up the shanty.  He’s out of it by this time, I reckon.  You might as well be perspiring to some purpose over there as gaspin’ under this tree.  We won’t go back to work this afternoon, but knock off now, and call it half a day.  Come!  Hump yourselves, gentlemen.  Are you ready?  One, two, three, and away!”

In another instant the tree was deserted; the figures of the five millionaires of Devil’s Ford, crossing the fierce glare of the open space, with boyish alacrity, glistened in the sunlight, and then disappeared in the nearest fringe of thickets.

CHAPTER II

Six hours later, when the shadow of Devil’s Spur had crossed the river, and spread a slight coolness over the flat beyond, the Pioneer coach, leaving the summit, began also to bathe its heated bulk in the long shadows of the descent.  Conspicuous among the dusty passengers, the two pretty and youthful faces of the daughters of Philip Carr, mining superintendent and engineer, looked from the windows with no little anxiety towards their future home in the straggling settlement below, that occasionally came in view at the turns of the long zigzagging road.  A slight look of comical disappointment passed between them as they gazed upon the sterile flat, dotted with unsightly excrescences that stood equally for cabins or mounds of stone and gravel.  It was so feeble and inconsistent a culmination to the beautiful scenery they had passed through, so hopeless and imbecile a conclusion to the preparation of that long picturesque journey, with its glimpses of sylvan and pastoral glades and canyons, that, as the coach swept down the last incline, and the remorseless monotony of the dead level spread out before them, furrowed by ditches and indented by pits, under cover of shielding their cheeks from the impalpable dust that rose beneath the plunging wheels, they buried