In September it was that the bit of quartz was carried down to Springtown; before the winter snows had thought of melting, a town of rude frame huts had sprung up in the hollow below, and Lame Gulch was a flourishing mining-camp. All the rough-scuff of the countryside promptly gathered there, and elbowed, with equal indifference, the honest miner, the less honest saloon-keeper, and the capitalist, the degree of whose claim to that laudatory adjective was not to be so easily fixed. No one seemed out of place in the crazy, zigzag streets, no sound seemed foreign to this new, conglomerate atmosphere. The fluent profanity of the mule-driver, the shrill laugh of the dance-hall; the prolonged rattle and final roar of the ore-chute, the steady pick of the laborer at the prospect-hole;--each played its part to burden and stain the pure, high air that had seemed so like the air of Heaven itself. Amberley stayed on in his lonely lean-to, or roamed over his desecrated acres, bewildered and aggrieved. What were the mountains thinking of to admit these savage hordes! Whither should he go, where should he find a refuge, since his trusted allies had played him false? He loathed it all, loathed most of all Enoch's exultant suggestion that there might be gold on their land. "But we'll lay low for a while," Enoch said, with an air of profound cunning. "We'll wait till they're plumb crazy, and then we kin git our own price!" And Amberley stayed on all through that trying winter, simply because he knew of no better place to go to, and the spring came and found him there, unreconciled, to be sure, but leading his usual life. And so it happened that one day, when the snow had disappeared from all the southerly slopes, and the wind was toward the Camp, so that the sounds he hated came dulled and hushed to his ear, Amberley ventured a few rods down the hillside in search of a missing calf. The truant was a pretty, white-nosed creature, a special pet of his master's, with great brown, confiding eyes, and ample ears, and Amberley had named him Simon. Not a usual name for a calf, as Simon was well aware, but somehow it gave the lonely man a peculiar pleasure to know that his name was borne by a cheerful young thing, with frisky tail and active legs, and everything to live for. As the elder Simon strolled down the hillside on this particular spring day, calling and peering from side to side, his eye fell upon the first daisy of the season, nestling close at his feet,--a single blossom among a crowded group of little short-stemmed scrubby buds. He stooped to pick it, and was standing, lost in wonder over its frailty and its hardihood, when a child's voice struck his ear, calling, "Come Bossie, come!"