setting up of machinery, and the policing of a mining camp, he
threw himself as earnestly into the work before him as though to
show his subordinates that it did not matter who did the work, so
long as it was done. The men at first were sulky, resentful, and
suspicious, but they could not long resist the fact that Clay was
doing the work of five men and five different kinds of work, not
only without grumbling, but apparently with the keenest pleasure.

He conciliated the rich coffee planters who owned the land
which he wanted for the freight road by calls of the most formal
state and dinners of much less formality, for he saw that the
iron mine had its social as well as its political side. And with
this fact in mind, he opened the railroad with great ceremony,
and much music and feasting, and the first piece of ore taken out
of the mine was presented to the wife of the Minister of the
Interior in a cluster of diamonds, which made the wives of the
other members of the Cabinet regret that their husbands had not
chosen that portfolio. Six months followed of hard, unremitting
work, during which time the great pier grew out into the bay from
MacWilliams' railroad, and the face of the first mountain was
scarred and torn of its green, and left in mangled nakedness,
while the ringing of hammers and picks, and the racking blasts of
dynamite, and the warning whistles of the dummy-engines drove
away the accumulated silence of centuries.

It had been a long uphill fight, and Clay had enjoyed it
mightily. Two unexpected events had contributed to help it. One
was the arrival in Valencia of young Teddy Langham, who came
ostensibly to learn the profession of which Clay was so
conspicuous an example, and in reality to watch over his father's