tone of the voice of The Corner was this persistent ringing of metal. It
suggested to Donnegan that here was a town filled with men of iron and
all the gentler parts of their natures forgotten. An odd place to bring
such a woman as Lou Macon, surely!

He reached the level, and entered the town.




11


Hunting for news, he went naturally to the news emporium which took the
place of the daily paper--namely, he went to the saloons. But on the way
he ran through a liberal cross-section of The Corner's populace. First
of all, the tents and the ruder shacks. He saw little sheet-iron stoves
with the tin dishes piled, unwashed, upon the tops of them when the
miners rushed back to their work; broken handles of picks and shovels;
worn-out shirts and overalls lay where they had been tossed; here was a
flat strip of canvas supported by four four-foot poles and without
shelter at the sides, and the belongings of one careless miner tumbled
beneath this miserable shelter; another man had striven for some
semblance of a home and he had framed a five-foot walk leading up to the
closed flap of his tent with stones of a regular size. But nowhere was
there a sign of life, and would not be until semidarkness brought the
unwilling workers back to the tents.

Out of this district he passed quickly onto the main street, and here
there was a different atmosphere. The first thing he saw was a man