His feet and hands were soon like ice but he was scarcely conscious of the pain for his heart-ache was so much greater. As he pursued the elusive quicksilver and worked the sand and gravel to the end of the box all he could see was the stack of receipted bills which the work and plant had cost, in shocking contrast to that tiny ball of amalgam lying in the chamois-skin on the rock. He had spent all of $40,000 and he doubted if he would take $20 from the entire clean-up as it now looked. How could he break the news to Helen Dunbar? Where would he find the courage to tell the unfriendly stockholders the exact truth? It was a foregone conclusion that they would consider him a fakir and a crook. It had to be done. As, in his imagination, he faced the ordeal he unconsciously straightened up. "Burt! Burt! come quick!" Banule was waving his arms frantically from the platform of the pump-house. There was desperation in his cry for help. He dashed back inside as soon as he saw Bruce jump out of the sluice-box. Before Bruce reached the pump-house he heard Banule ringing the telephone violently, and his frenzied shout: "Shut down, Smaltz! Shut down! Where are you? Can't you hear? For God's sake shut down, everything's burnin' up!" He was ringing as though he would have torn the box loose from the wall when Bruce reached the pump-house door. Bruce turned sick when he heard the crackling of the burning motors and saw the electric flames. "Somethin's happened in the power-house! I can't ring him! He must have got a shock! Until I know what's wrong, I don't dare shut down for fear I'll burn everything out up there!" "_Keep her going!_" Bruce bounded through the door and dropped from the platform. Then he threw off his hat as he always did when excited, and ran. And how he ran! With his fists clenched and his arms tight against his sides he ran as though the hip-boots were the seven-league boots of fable. In the stretch of deep sand he had to cross the weight was killing. The drag of the heavy boots seemed to pull his legs from their sockets but he did not slacken his pace. His breath was coming in gasps when he started up the steep trail which led from the sand over a high promontory. He clutched at bushes, rocks, anything to pull himself up and the pounding of his heart sounded to him like the chug of a steamboat, before he reached the top. The veins and arteries in his forehead and neck seemed bursting, as did his over-taxed lungs, when he started stumbling and sliding down the other side. It was not the distance he had covered which had so winded him, nor even the terrific pace, but the dragging weight of the hip-boots. They felt as though they were soled with lead. He imagined that he had crawled but as a matter of fact the distance would never be covered in the same space of time again.