At the foot of one of the callouses lies the mining hamlet of Powder Can; once, in the day of the early mineral discoveries, a plangent, strident nucleus of excitement, but--in the phrase of its oldest inhabitant--a “has-been” at the time of David Vallory’s advent, with a few deep shafts and winding drifts out of which day-laborers, unenthusiastic successors of the early discoverers and plungers, winched or wheeled a few monthly car-loads of low-grade ore. In some measure the Nevada Short Line’s track-changing activities had brought a return of the plangencies. Scattered construction camps with their armies of workmen dotted the basin above and below the mining town, and once more saloons and dance-halls and gambling places sprang up and did a thriving business on real pay-roll money. Eben Grillage’s attitude toward these absorbents of the money he paid out for labor had ever been that of the closed eye. To all appeals for the betterment of conditions in the humanitarian field he had a stereotyped reply: “The Grillage Engineering Company is strictly an industrial proposition. It does not undertake to say how its employees shall spend their time or their money when they are off duty.” On the summit of a ridge diagonally opposite Powder Can the prospective millionaires of the mining-camp had, in the day of magnificent expectations, laid out a suburb for the future city, and in token of their faith in the future had built a log-house hotel with appropriate cottages. For some years after the collapse of the mining boom the hotel had remained closed; but with the nearer approach of the railroad it was reopened, with a few families from Brewster as the groundwork of the guest structure, and some small sprinkling of tourists to come and go during the season. For a month or more after his arrival in the Hophra basin, David Vallory saw little of Powder Can the town, and still less of the log-built inn on the top of the adjacent ridge. New to every phase of the track-changing project, he had scant time even for eating and sleeping. At a dozen different points on the new location the work was driving at top speed; here and there bridges in process of construction over the swift mountain stream; numerous hill cuttings where great steam-shovels clashed their gears and chains from shift to shift throughout the twenty-four-hour days; prodigious fills growing foot by foot with the dumped spoil from the cuttings; and, last but by no means least, the projected tunnel under Powder Pass which was inching its way from both sides of the mountain in gigantic worm-gnawings through the granite.