On the back porch of the "office," young Lockwood--his boots, stained with the mud of
the mines and with candle-drippings, on the rail--sat smoking his pipe and looking off
down the cañon.
It was early in the evening. Lockwood, because he had heard the laughter and horseplay
of the men of the night shift as they went down the cañon from the bunk-house to the
tunnel-mouth, knew that it was a little after seven. It would not be necessary to go
indoors and begin work on the columns of figures of his pay-roll for another hour yet. He
knocked the ashes out of his pipe, refilled and lighted it--stoppering with his match-box--
and shot a wavering blue wreath out over the porch railing. Then he resettled himself in
his tilted chair, hooked his thumbs into his belt, and fetched a long breath.
For the last few moments he had been considering, in that comfortable spirit of relaxed
attention that comes with the after-dinner tobacco, two subjects: first, the beauty of the
evening; second, the temperament, character, and appearance of Felice Zavalla.
As for the evening, there could be no two opinions about that. It was charming. The
Hand-over-fist Gravel Mine, though not in the higher Sierras, was sufficiently above the
level of the mere foot-hills to be in the sphere of influence of the greater mountains. Also,
it was remote, difficult of access. Iowa Hill, the nearest post-office, was a good eight
miles distant, by trail, across the Indian River. It was sixteen miles by stage from Iowa
Hill to Colfax, on the line of the Overland Railroad, and all of a hundred miles from
Colfax to San Francisco.
To Lockwood's mind this isolation was in itself an attraction. Tucked away in this fold of
the Sierras, forgotten, remote, the little community of a hundred souls that comprised the
personnel of the Hand-over-fist lived out its life with the completeness of an independent
State, having its own government, its own institutions and customs. Besides all this, it
had its own dramas as well--little complications that developed with the swiftness of
whirlpools, and that trended toward culmination with true Western directness. Lockwood,
college-bred--he was a graduate of the Columbia School of Mines--found the life
interesting.
On this particular evening he sat over his pipe rather longer than usual, seduced by the
beauty of the scene and the moment. It was very quiet. The prolonged rumble of the
mine's stamp-mill came to his ears in a ceaseless diapason, but the sound was so much a
matter of course that Lockwood no longer heard it. The millions of pines and redwoods
that covered the flanks of the mountains were absolutely still. No wind was stirring in
their needles. But the chorus of tree-toads, dry, staccato, was as incessant as the pounding
of the mill. Far-off--thousands of miles, it seemed--an owl was hooting, three velvet-soft
notes at exact intervals. A cow in the stable near at hand lay down with a long breath,
