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"At least," cried old Bernique at last, "at least the Teegmores are yours! At last! At last!" At last! At last! Steering's eyes were travelling the long tumbling Tigmore line. "If they are," he said in that musing way he had developed within the last quarter of an hour, "if I take the Tigmores now, Uncle Bernique, I'll pull Madeira's house about him.
In Canaan almost any joke had a fair chance to become classic through immediate and long-drawn repetition, and the superintendent's joke was soon going up and down the street as majestically as though swathed in a Roman toga. By seven o'clock the joke had come on to Madeira's ears.
As the winter broke, Madeira's ability to seize the pivotal point on which to turn theory into practice wrought so surely and so swiftly as to be inexplicable to anyone unaware of the fever that drove him on. His first face of ore had cut blind, but he only put two more drills to work, and in the early spring one of the drills struck ore again, a small face, but ore.
Madeira's weight was terrific, even after Steering had brought his other hand into requisition; and though Throcker sprang to the rescue, Throcker was a weak man and the best aid that he could render was to assume a small share of Madeira's weight by getting down flat upon the ledge, after Steering's fashion.
Steering pounded on the ground with one fist and clenched his hands tightly about his knees. That was not the worst, and he might as well face the worst. There was also by now the bitterest sort of animosity toward him on Madeira's part.
How would that suit you? We can talk and smoke." "Naw," Piney extended his hand and shook his head, as though to push the hotel out of the range of possibilities for him, "I couldn't. Much oblige'. But I cayn't sleep in haouses. Got to git back to the shack in the woods. Wisht you'd go on over to Madeira's." "No. I'll buck it out here alone," lamented Bruce.
Dog-oned ef th'aint abaout ev'thing tha'. Got the cote-haouse an' all, the relroad an' all Miss Sally Madeira, Mist' Crit Madeira's daughter, she lives tha'." It had gone like that every time. Not once in the last twenty miles had Steering exchanged a word with man or woman without this sort of reference to Canaan and, collaterally, to Miss Sally Madeira.
"Eh, God! You! Wait there! You! You! Steering, with the old prowess that had made the boys on the gridiron stand aside and howl for him, reached up and brought Madeira's arms down with a circling, sweeping blow, then caught the bulky, staggering body and thrashed it into a chair, forgetful that it was Madeira, forgetful of Sally Madeira, forgetful of everything for one red instant save a savage masculine joy in his own strength.
Louis shops, holding to the big man's finger, trying to think up something else that she might possibly want. Later, under the girl's own direction, the money went to better purpose. His daughter's way of spending the money early became, in Madeira's manner of getting at the thing, a sort of balance-wheel to his way of making it.
Meantime the organisation of Madeira's company is being effected among the local capitalists, the store-keepers and the substantial farmers, and it's only a question of a few days until the directorate shuts in my face. Madeira is to take me over to Joplin to-morrow, to let the showing there have its effect upon me, to let me catch the ore fever, I suspect.
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