That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy at work on a drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all out on the platform together, sitting there, under the tented heavens, with the same sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a parlour, when the sound of brisk footsteps came mounting up the path.  We pricked our ears at this, for the tread seemed lighter and firmer than was usual with our country neighbours.  And presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with cigars and kid gloves, came debauching past the house.  They looked in that place like a blasphemy.

“Good evening,” they said.  For none of us had stirred; we all sat stiff with wonder.

“Good evening,” I returned; and then, to put them at their ease, “A stiff climb,” I added.

“Yes,” replied the leader; “but we have to thank you for this path.”

I did not like the man’s tone.  None of us liked it.  He did not seem embarrassed by the meeting, but threw us his remarks like favours, and strode magisterially by us towards the shaft and tunnel.

Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion.  “We drifted every sort of way, but couldn’t strike the ledge.”  Then again:  “It pinched out here.”  And once more:  “Every minor that ever worked upon it says there’s bound to be a ledge somewhere.”

These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they had a damning significance.  We, the lords of Silverado, had come face to face with our superior.  It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation.  I liked well enough to be a squatter when there was none but Hanson by; before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed.  I hastened to do him fealty, said I gathered he was the Squattee, and apologized.  He threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly pleasant—­more pleasant to him, I fancy, than to me; and then he passed off into praises of the former state of Silverado.  “It was the busiest little mining town you ever saw:”  a population of between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls, the engine in full blast, the mill newly erected; nothing going but champagne, and hope the order of the day.  Ninety thousand dollars came out; a hundred and forty thousand were put in, making a net loss of fifty thousand.  The last days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley, were not so bright; the champagne had ceased to flow, the population was already moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to wither in the branch before it was cut at the root.  The last shot that was fired knocked over the stove chimney, and made that hole in the roof of our barrack, through which the sun was wont to visit slug-a-beds towards afternoon.  A noisy, last shot, to inaugurate the days of silence.