The mountain towered above,--a heavy Rembrandtish mass of black shadow,--sharply cut here and there against a sky so inconceivably remote that the world-sick soul must have despaired of ever reaching so far, or of climbing its steel-blue walls.

The stars were large, keen, and brilliant, but cold and steadfast.

They did not dance nor twinkle in their adamantine setting.

The furnace fire painted the faces of the men an Indian red, glanced on brightly colored blanket and serape, but was eventually caught and absorbed in the waiting shadows of the black mountain, scarcely twenty feet from the furnace door.

The low, half-sung, half-whispered foreign speech of the group, the roaring of the furnace, and the quick, sharp yelp of a coyote on the plain below were the only sounds that broke the awful silence of the hills.
It was almost dawn when it was announced that the ore had fused.