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But were they really awake now? They could not tell. They accepted everything with the confidence and credulity of all children who have no experience to compare with their first impressions and to whom the future contains nothing impossible. It was without surprise, therefore, that they felt themselves lifted on the shoulders of the men who were making quite a procession along the steep trail towards the settlement again. Polly noticed that at the mouth of the other tunnels they were greeted by men as if they were carrying tidings of great joy; that they stopped to rejoice together, and that in some mysterious manner their conductors had got their faces washed, and had become more like beings of the outer world. When they neared the settlement the excitement seemed to have become greater; people rushed out to shake hands with the men who were carrying them, and overpowered even the children with questions they could not understand. Only one sentence Polly could clearly remember as being the burden of all congratulations. “Struck the old lead at last!” With a faint consciousness that she knew something about it, she tried to assume a dignified attitude on the leader’s shoulders, even while she was beginning to be heavy with sleep.

And then she remembered a crowd near her father’s house, out of which her father came smiling pleasantly on her, but not interfering with her triumphal progress until the leader finally deposited her in her mother’s lap in their own sitting-room. And then she remembered being “cross,” and declining to answer any questions, and shortly afterwards found herself comfortably in bed. Then she heard her mother say to her father:–

“It really seems too ridiculous for anything, John; the idea of those grown men dressing themselves up to play with children.”

“Ridiculous or not,” said her father, “these grown men of the Excelsior mine have just struck the famous old lode of Red Mountain, which is as good as a fortune to everybody on the Ridge, and were as wild as boys! And they say it never would have been found if Polly hadn’t tumbled over the slide directly on top of the outcrop, and left the absurd wig of that wretched doll of hers to mark its site.”

“And that,” murmured Polly sleepily to her doll as she drew it closer to her breast, “is all that they know of it.”