Work, often stretching into many hours of overtime, filled the first few weeks for the tenderfoot from New Hampshire. The narrow-gauge railroad reaching out toward Leadville was taxed to its capacity and beyond, and there was little rest and less leisure for the office force. Still, Philip was able now and again to catch an appraisive glimpse of what was now becoming a thrilling and spectacular scene in the great American drama of development,--a headling, migratory irruption which had had its prototypes in the rush of the ’49-ers to the California gold fields, the wagon-train dash for Pike’s Peak, and the now waning invasion of the Black Hills by the gold seekers, but which differed from them all in being facilitated and tremendously augmented by a swift and easy railroad approach. Vaguely at first, but later with quickening pulses, Philip came to realize that the moment was epochal; that he was a passive participant in a spectacle which was marking one of the mighty human surges by which the wilderness barriers are broken down and the waste places occupied. With a prophetic premonition that this might well be the last and perhaps the greatest of the surges, Philip was conscious of a growing and militant desire to be not only in it, but of it. The very air he breathed was intoxicating with the spirit of avid and eager activity and excitement, and the rush to the mountains increased as the season advanced. The labor turn-over in the railroad office grew to be a hampering burden, and now Philip understood why the auditor had asked him if he were a potential treasure hunter. Almost every day saw a new clerk installed to take the place of a fresh deserter. After the lapse of a short month, Philip, Middleton and Baxter, the head bookkeeper, were the three oldest employees, in point of time served, in the auditing department. Two railroads, the South Park and the Denver & Rio Grande, were building at frantic speed toward Leadville, racing each other to be first at the goal; and from the daily advancing end-of-track of each a stage line hurried the mixed mob of treasure-seekers and birds of prey of both sexes on to their destination in the great carbonate camp at the head of California Gulch. To sit calmly at a desk adding columns of figures while all this was going on became at first onerous, and later a daily fight for the needful concentration upon the adding monotonies.