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Updated: May 25, 2025
Mighty interesting, I tell you," and with a cheery wave of the hand to his friend Isaac, whose eyes had been looking streetward at the precise moment, Peter pushed me ahead of him up the worn marble steps flanked by the rust-eaten iron railing which led to the hallway and stairs, and so on up to his apartment.
The young gold seeker's first look about him was disappointing. Nothing but the bare walls met his eyes. Then, in the farthest corner, he observed something that in the dancing torch-light was darker than the logs themselves, and he moved toward it. It was a tiny shelf, not more than a foot long, and upon it was a small tin box, black and rust-eaten by the passing of ages.
With that feeling of superstition which runneth in the blood of man, I shuddered, grew weak and faint; great drops of cold perspiration started out from my forehead, and I turned to see if some supernatural mechanism had not closed the door and entombed me with the lovely phantom. It was still open; its rust-eaten hinges had long since ceased to act.
The party at once began an eager search in the hope of finding other things that might be of use to them, and they were not altogether disappointed; for Jarring found a clasp-knife much rust-eaten, of course, but still fit for use. Slag found a much-battered frying-pan, and Tomlin discovered a large cast-iron pot behind the hut, with a chip out of its rim.
Here and there lay some discarded piece of mining machinery, rust-eaten and battered now, washed down inch by inch from the higher hill where it had been abandoned when the demonetization of silver struck, like a rapier, into the hearts of grubbing men, years before.
"Ye would be looking to the hogs," said he, as if he had kent us from the hillside and no greeting was needed; and as he spoke I thought of an old door swinging on rust-eaten hinges, for his voice was deep and harsh, as though he opened his mouth seldom to speak; and indeed such was the case, for he lived on his farm among the hills alone with his dogs.
So high it was, so lost in a wilderness of trees and bush, looking out over a land relapsed now altogether to a barbarism of patch and hovel, so solitary and chill under the tropical sky for even the guards who still watched over its suspected treasures feared to live in its ghostly galleries and had made hovels outside its walls and at the same time so huge and grandiose there were walls thirty feet thick, galleries with scores of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls, king's apartments and queen's apartments, towering battlements and great arched doorways that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and passing of that miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing of multitudes before one man and the transitoriness of such glories, more completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world before.
I was silent from shame, but Martin, having hauled me up the rock by help of the broom handle, rattled away as if nothing had happened pointing proudly to a rust-eaten triangle with a bell suspended inside of it and his little flag floating on top. "But, oh dear, what are we to do now?" I whimpered. "Don't you worrit about that," he said.
Cannon were run out; matches kept lighted; whole battalions maintained under arms; munitions and provisions of war laid in, as though to withstand a regular siege; drawbridges pulled up and portcullises lowered, with great clanking of chains and gnashing of old iron teeth; and rich sport it was to see those old rust-eaten engines once more brought into gear again.
The chinking had long since fallen from between the logs and the night wind whipped the smoke in stinging volleys from gaping holes in the rust-eaten jacket of the dilapidated air-tight.
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