The camp was in the dusk when they entered it, the soft dusk that falls over early summer evenings in the hills, when everything in nature seems drowsily awaiting the night. They thought there was an unusual hush in the manner of those they met. Men talked on the corners or in groups in the roadway with unaccustomed earnestness. Women leaned across window sills and chatted across intervening spaces with an air of anxiety; the very dogs in the street appeared to be subdued. At the trader's there was not the usual small gathering of loungers, squatted sociably around on cracker boxes and packing cases, and the man with the twang was alone. "Say, there's something wrong with that stuff you sent us," Bill began, and the trader answered with a soft, absent-minded, "So?" Bill repeated the words of the cook; but the storekeeper continued to stare out of the door as if but half of what was said proved interesting. "I'll send up and bring it back to-morrow," he replied when the miner had concluded his complaint. "The fact is it's a job lot I bought in Portland, and I didn't look at it. Came in yesterday. I ain't--I ain't exactly feelin' right. I suppose you heard about it?" The partners looked at him questioningly, but he did not shift his eyes from the door through which he still appeared to be staring away into the distance, and it was easy to conjecture, from the expression of his eyes, that he was seeing a tragedy. "I'm sort of busted up," he went on, without looking at them. "You see I had a brother over there. A shift boss, he was. Him and me was more than brothers. We was friends. It don't seem right that Hiram was down there, in the dark, when the big cave came--came just as if the whole mountain wanted to smash them men under it. It don't seem right! I can't quite get it all yet. I'm goin' over there on the stage in the mornin'. He's left a widder and a couple of little shavers. I'm goin' to bring 'em here." "We don't quite understand you," Dick said, hesitatingly, and with sympathy in his voice. "We haven't heard about it--whatever it is. I'm sorry if----" The trader straightened up from where he had been leaning on his elbows across the counter and they saw that his face was drawn. "Oh, I see," he said, in the same slow, hopeless voice. "I forgot you men don't come down here very often and that my driver never has anything to say to anybody. Why, it's the Blackbird mine over across the divide--on the east spur. Bad, old fashioned mine she was, with crawlin' ground. Lime streaks all through the formation and plenty of water. Nobody quite knows how it happened. There was a big slip over there a few days ago on the four-hundred-foot level. Thirty odd men back of it. Timbers went off, they say, like a gatlin' gun. I just can't seem to understand how they didn't handle that ground better. It don't look right to me!"