A private chivalry

The lights of Silverette were beginning to prick the dusk in the valley, and the clanging of a piano, diminished to a harmonious tinkling, floated up the mountain on the still air of the evening. At the Jessica workings, a thousand feet above the valley, even the clangour of a tuneless piano had its compensations; and to one of the two men sitting on the puncheon-floored porch of the assayer’s cabin the minimized tinkling was remindful of care-free student ramblings in the land of the zither. But the other had no such pleasant memories, and he rose and relighted his cigar. “That is my cue, Ned. I must go down and do that whereunto I have set my hand.” “‘Must,’ you say; that implies necessity. I don’t see it.” “I couldn’t expect you to see or to understand the necessity; but it is there, all the same.” The objector was silent while one might count ten, but the silence was not of convincement. It was rather a lack of strong words to add to those which had gone before. And when he began again it was only to clinch insistence with iteration. “I say I don’t see it. There is no necessity greater than a man’s will; and when you try to make me believe that the honour man of my class is constrained to come down to dealing faro in a mining camp——”“I know, Ned; but you don’t understand. You saw the fair beginning ten years ago, and now you are getting a glimpse of the ending. To you, I suppose, it seems like Lucifer’s fall—a drop from heaven to hell; and so it is in effect. But, as a matter of fact, a man doesn’t fall; he climbs down into the pit a step at a time—and there are more steps behind me than I can ever retrace.”