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."