one day from a cleared patch in the bushes, sitting in the shade of
a roof of straw erected for her on three rough poles under Don Pepe's
direction.

Mrs. Gould had seen it all from the beginning: the clearing of the
wilderness, the making of the road, the cutting of new paths up the
cliff face of San Tome. For weeks together she had lived on the spot
with her husband; and she was so little in Sulaco during that year that
the appearance of the Gould carriage on the Alameda would cause a social
excitement. From the heavy family coaches full of stately senoras and
black-eyed senoritas rolling solemnly in the shaded alley white hands
were waved towards her with animation in a flutter of greetings. Dona
Emilia was "down from the mountain."

But not for long. Dona Emilia would be gone "up to the mountain" in a
day or two, and her sleek carriage mules would have an easy time of
it for another long spell. She had watched the erection of the first
frame-house put up on the lower mesa for an office and Don Pepe's
quarters; she heard with a thrill of thankful emotion the first wagon
load of ore rattle down the then only shoot; she had stood by her
husband's side perfectly silent, and gone cold all over with excitement
at the instant when the first battery of only fifteen stamps was put
in motion for the first time. On the occasion when the fires under the
first set of retorts in their shed had glowed far into the night she did
not retire to rest on the rough cadre set up for her in the as yet bare
frame-house till she had seen the first spongy lump of silver yielded to
the hazards of the world by the dark depths of the Gould Concession;
she had laid her unmercenary hands, with an eagerness that made them
tremble, upon the first silver ingot turned out still warm from the
mould; and by her imaginative estimate of its power she endowed that