There seemed to her more noise to-night, more of a seething, whirling froth of excitement than she had ever noticed before. She thought it a reflection of her own fever and hurried on, her eyes gleaming through her veil in peering looks sent ahead for Jerry. She was nearing the short street which led down to the Cresta Plata, when from two miners, almost running past her, she heard his name. Her heart leaped, and for a second she flinched and shrank back into the doorway. As she stood there a group of men brushed by in the opposite direction and from these, as they paused for a second at her side, she heard a question and answer: “How did he come to fall? Did he slip?” “Yes, on the iron plates. He stepped back and then slipped, and before Black Dan could get him he was gone. It was all done in a minute.” “Lord!” came the ejaculation in a tone of horror. She started on and from a cluster of men standing in a saloon doorway she again heard his name. The perspiration broke out on her face. At the mouth of the lane that led to the Cresta Plata a crowd with restless edges, that moved down toward the hoisting works and swayed out into the roadway, made a black mass, expanding and decreasing as its members dispersed or drew together. It was too early for the day shift to be coming up, and she looked at it with sidelong alarm. It was part of the unusualness of this weird and awful night. And again as she threaded her way through the scattering of figures on its outskirts she heard his name, twice in the moment of passing. What was the matter? Why were they all talking of him? The sense of horror that weighed on her seemed to increase until it became threatening and tragic. She felt as if she were in a nightmare, with the Colonel’s rooms and the Colonel the only place of safety and means of escape. She forgot to be cautious and started to run, pushing her way through the crowd, dodging round the edges of excited groups, brushing by knots of women collected at the foot of stairways, and from every group the name of Jerry followed her. Suddenly, between the massed and moving figures she saw the glare of the colored bottles in the window of Caswell’s drug store. It was over this store that the Colonel lived. At one side, outside the brilliant radiance of the bottled transparencies, a small, dark door gave on the stairs that led to the floor above. From its central panel a bell-handle protruded. She tried the knob first and found that it yielded. Opening it softly she looked up the dim stairway and saw in the hall above a light burning. She ran up, her steps subdued on the worn carpet. A narrow corridor divided the floor, passing from a door that opened on the front balcony back to an anterior region where the landlady lived and let rooms to less illustrious lodgers. Of the two suites in the front that on the left was occupied by Rion Gracey, the other by the Colonel. June had often been in these rooms. She opened the door and looked in.