The Knob overlooked a little grassy shelf a few hundred feet below, where stood a miner's cabin, with weed-grown gravel heaps near by, in front of which a tree bore the legend, painted roughly on a board: "The Little Paymaster Claim." From its point of vantage, too, unobserved, she could look down into the gulch far below, where yellowish-brown cones reared like gigantic ant-hills--the ear-marks of the placer miner--and gray streaks indicated the flumes in which, by tortuous meanderings, the water descended to do its work in the sluices. She could even watch the toiling miners, hoisting the gravel by windlasses, or shovelling it into the long narrow boxes through which the foaming water raced. So limpid was the air that in the little town she could distinguish each several building lining the single straight street--a familiar succession of gilded café, general emporium and drug store, with the dull terra cotta "depot" at one end, and on the other, on a sunburned acre of its own, the glaring white court-house, flanked by the post-office and the jail. She could see the clouds of dust, the wagons hitched at the curb and the drab figures grouped at the corners or passing in and out of doorways. Her interest had opened eagerly to these scenes. The solitudes soothed and the life of the community below, frankly primitive and uncomplicated, attracted her. Between the town of Smoky Mountain and the expensive sanatorium on the ridge a great social gulf was fixed; the latter's patrons for the most part came and went by the narrow-gage road that linked with the northern junction; the settlement far below was only a feature of the panorama for which they paid so well. Even Doctor Brent--who had perched this place of healing where his patients could breathe air fresh from the Pacific and cooled by the snow-peaks--knew it chiefly through two of its citizens, Mrs. Halloran, the capable, bustling wife of the proprietor of the Mountain Valley House, the town's single hostelry, who brewed old-fashioned blackberry wine and cordials for his patients, and Tom Felder, a young lawyer whom he had known on the coast before ill health had sent him to hang out his shingle in a more genial altitude. The latter sometimes came for a chat with the physician, and on one of these calls Jessica and he had met. She had liked his keen, good-humored face and waving, slightly graying hair. She had met him once since on the mountain road, and he had walked with her and told her quaint stories of the townspeople. She did not guess that more than once since then he had walked there hoping to meet her again. He had taken her to Mrs. Halloran, whose heart she had won by praise of her cherry cordial. As Mrs. Halloran said afterward: "'Twas no flirt with the bottle and make love to the spoon! She ain't a bit set up. Take the word I give you, Tom Felder, an' go and swap lies with the doctor at the santaranium soon again. Ye can do worse."