“Easy, Jim,” laughed the promoter; “I know the color of your paints. But never mind,”--this to Philip and Bromley. “If you’ve got something that measures half-way up to those assays you had made last fall, I’m ready to talk turkey with you. But we’ll have to talk fast and work fast--if we want to protect ourselves. The rush for the new diggings isn’t more than a day’s march behind us on the trail we’ve broken over the range, and when it comes, we’ll be swamped. Jim, you old mossback, see if you can’t carve a couple more steaks off that deer bone and broil them for me. I’m as hungry as a hunter.” XI THOUGH it was now well into the summer edge of spring for the lower altitudes, a late snow had fallen during the night, and the Continental Divide, framed in the window where Philip was sitting, was clothed in virgin white. In the street below, the snow had already been trampled into a grimy batter by the hoofs and wheels of laboring streams of traffic. Philip looked down upon the busy street scene, trying vainly to realize that this teeming, throbbing, palpitant mining-camp city of thirty-five or forty thousand souls was less than three years old; that, only three backward turnings of the calendar in the past, the marvelous treasure beds in its swelling hills were barely getting themselves discovered. From such contemplation of the material marvel his thoughts turned inward. For the better part of a year, and with only the brief autumn visit to the great wonder camp to break the wilderness monotonies, he had been an exile with all the familiar human contacts dissevered; it had been a period during which, for him and Bromley, the moving world had ceased to exist. He was just now beginning to apprehend the complete totality of the time eclipse. In the lost interval an exciting national political campaign had run its course, Garfield had been elected president, and his inauguration had taken place; all this without disturbing, by so much as the turning of a leaf, the cosmic procession of the weeks and months in the mountain fastnesses, or recording itself in any way upon the pages of great Nature’s book of the unpeopled immensities. In the more intimate and personal relations there had been a corresponding break. Never more than a desultory letter-writer, he had sent a card to his mother and sisters in New Hampshire on the occasion of his former trip to Leadville, telling them not to write again until they should hear from him--that he expected to be out of reach of the mails for the duration of the winter. Hence, there had been no home letters awaiting him when he emerged from the western wilderness; nothing to help bridge the separating chasm of the months.