"Well, you'll hear from me," declared the delegate, as he put his hat on his head and turned out of the door without any parting courtesy. "Keep the card. My name's Thompson, you know." For a full minute after he had gone, the partners stared at each other with troubled faces. "Oh, he's a bluff! That's all there is to it," asserted Mathews, reaching into the corner for his rubber boots, preparatory to going underground. "He knows it ain't right, just as well as I do. If he can put this over, all right. If he can't he'll give us the other rating." He left Dick making up a time-roll, and turned down the hill; and they did not discuss it again until they were alone that night. It was seven o'clock the next evening when the partners observed an unusual stir in the camp. They came into the mess-house to find that the men had eaten in unusually short order; and from the bench outside, usually filled at that hour with laughing loungers, there was not a sound. A strange stillness had invaded the colony of the Croix d'Or, almost ominous. Preoccupied, and each thinking over his individual trials, the partners ate their food and arose from the table. Out on the doorstep they paused to look down the canyon, now shorn of ugliness and rendered beautiful by the purple twilight. The faint haze of smoke from the banked fires, rising above the steel chimney of the boiler-house, was the only stirring, living spectacle visible; save one. "What does that mean?" Bill drawled, as if speaking to himself. Far below, just turning the bend of the road, Dick saw a procession of men, grouped, or walking in pairs. They disappeared before he answered. "Looks like the boys," he said, using the term of the camps for all men employed. "I wonder where they are bound for? If it were pay night, I could understand. It would mean Goldpan, the dance halls, a fight or two, and sore heads to-morrow; but to-night--I don't know." Bill did not answer. He seemed to be in a silent, contemplative mood when they sat in the rough easy-chairs on the porch in front of the office and looked up at the first rays of light on the splendid, rugged peak above. Dick's mind reverted to the lumberman's daughter, as does the needle veer to the magnet; and for a long time they sat there, until the fires of their cigars glowed like stars. The moon came up, and the cross was outlined, dimly, above them, and against the background of black, cast upon the somber, starlit blue of the night.