Nor was the pang of intolerable pity for his mother only.

Deep in the melancholy of his nature and strengthened by that hateful tie of blood from which he could not escape, was a bitter, silent compassion for this outcast also.

All the machinery of life set in motion and maintaining itself in the clash of circumstance for seventy years to produce _this_, at the end! Dismal questionings ran through his mind.

Ought he to have acted as he had done seventeen years before?
How would his mother have judged him?
Was he not in some small degree responsible?
Meanwhile his father began to talk fast and querulously, with plentiful oaths from time to time, and using a local miner's slang which was not always intelligible to Anderson.

It seemed it was a question of an old silver mine on a mountainside in Idaho, deserted some ten years before when the river gravels had been exhausted, and now to be reopened, like many others in the same neighbourhood, with improved methods and machinery, tunnelling instead of washing.