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"Mike!" he breathed at last. "It's him. He's set the little place off."

What the change was that came upon him he could not have told. Certainly, there in the blackness of the woods and the night, he did not pause to analyze it. It was not that the little cabin over on the brow of the gulch was so valuable, or that anything in it was precious or not to be replaced, but the wrath that rose within him at Chinny Mike's act of spite was mightier than any passion he had felt through all the swift fight just past. It was like a sudden bursting upon him of a sense of wrong received from the marauders, of which he had been unconscious till now.

He turned slowly in his tracks and stared, half awake to the idea at first, then in a single flash of thought his whole purpose changed. Deliberately he turned back upon his trail and began to retrace his steps.

"This is a bit too much, Jimmie," he whispered to himself, though he was not thinking of the words. "The bag's costin' too darn much."

Across the gulch he went, treading almost the same path he had followed at such a mad speed five minutes before, and now it was as if each step he took roused further a waking demon that had stirred in him. He hurried. He broke

into a half run, splashing back through the ford regardless now of the danger of shots from above. He scrambled up the bank and turned to run again, with the blood rushing through his veins like some heated fluid that was driving him into fever.

Just for an instant he paused at the edge of the trees to drop the leathern bag into a little hollow there and then he clutched his gun and ran on. Panting, stumbling, he climbed the high side of the gully, and with utter carelessness entered a space that was now just touched by the light of the rising moon. But the cabin was before him, just a little way further on, and the yellow core of light within its walls, which he could already see, eclipsed the moon's feeble. shimmer. Toward it he aimed his course as if to rush upon the fire with the hope of stamping out its blaze under his feet, and on he plunged.

His breath came in hard gasps now,

curses and hissing, inarticulate sounds carried on its broken currents.

. "Ah, Mike Dolley, where are ye?" he questioned. "Where are ye? Have you run away from me? Did you know I was comin' back? Can you see me or can't ye?"

He reached the cabin. At the door he stood one instant and looked at the burning interior, already a furnace; then the fury within him burst out from his throat. He turned back to the wild woods and mountains and threw up his arms to them and to the sky and howled out his wrath and his challenge.

"Blast yer eyes, Mike Dolley!" he shrieked to the echoing gulch. "Where are ye? Come back and fight!"

A man stepped from behind the corner of the little outbuilding just beyond the cabin, and stood still in the moonlight. Dan saw him-saw him raise his gun deliberately and fire-and at the same instant he felt the bullet crash into his side. But something else he saw also. The man's head was bound up with a cloth and the face beneath was the face of Chinny Mike.

Carter's leap forward was like a cat's and the shot he fired struck Mike Dolley squarely between the eyes. And then, as they fell to the ground together, he struck and clawed and bit and tore at his enemy in brute desire to destroy him utterly, not even imagining that his one bullet had gone true. And when the blackness of unconsciousness settled down upon him, the fingers of his hands were on Mike's hairy lifeless throat, and clutching impotently at it.

It seemed hours afterward that he came back to consciousness. When he opened his eyes, too, it was as if he had dreamed, for over him, unmistakably in the flesh and clearly enough no helpless cripple, knelt Jim, and he was calling and talking and mourning like a child while he worked away at some painful spot in Dan's own prostrate body.

"Danny, Danny, you consarned fool. what have ye been doin'?" he was moaning over and over in husky iteration, while his hands were never for an instant quiet over the wound of his friend.

"Shut up!" whispered Dan. "What's the matter with ye?" Then suddenly,

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"Satchel, Dan? Bud?"

"Yes," said Dan slowly. "Oh, I saved the darn thing. Don't worry. It's down in the trees by the creek, and it'll be all right there fer a minute."

Jim Bell bent close to his chum. "Bud told you that, did he, Danny? An' you been fightin' like this fer me? Did ye think I would 'a' had gold dust long an' not tell you? I told Bud that-yes-but I was kiddin' the thievin' little cuss. That satchel? It don't hold nothin' but ca'tridges !"

The Shaded Stream

The elm trees shade the winding stream
Where in long reaches, calm and cool,
It widens out, a placid pool,

Silent and slow with scarce a gleam;
Here scented herbs o'erhang the brink,

And shy birds come to bathe and drink.

And here, contented, half-asleep,

When comes the noontide's hour of ease,

Within the shadow of the trees,

The lazy cattle stand knee-deep,

While up and down the dragon fly
With gleaming wings goes flashing by.

And when the sun sinks to the hills,

When cool, soft breezes stir the leaves,
And far away a lone dove grieves,

The piping frogs begin their trills;
Then all the still stream seems to call
With flute-like notes that rise and fall.

-E. E. MILLER, in Farmer's Voice.

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HE enormous quantity of iron ore which is being scooped from the ranges about Lake Superior, dug out of the hills of Alabama and Tennessee and hoisted from the deep pits of Pennsylvania, has caused the geologist and mineralogist to make startling predictions. Some of them have gone so far as to say that we are approaching an era when iron may rank among the rarer metals because of its scarcity. Even James J. Hill, the railroad magnate and developer of the Northwest, who was one of the first to realize the vast deposits of ore in the Superior ranges, has made the prophecy that perhaps within a half century most of the richer ore beds will be exhausted and that we may be obliged to go outside of America for much of

the raw material for our smelters and furnaces.

Here, indeed, is a condition which is of the utmost gravity if there is any truth in these predictions. Iron a rare metal? One feels like laughing at the assertion. It seems so ridiculous when a cent will buy a pound bar of high grade metal, and a nickel will purchase a pound which has been sliced and pressed into nails. Everywhere about us, used for purposes without number, it seems as common, as necessary as the very food we eat. Yet fifty years ago iron was a comparatively scarce metal. If the sayings of its prophets come true, then the Iron Age will indeed have been short, lasting only about a century.

When the experts speak of the supply of iron ore, however, they only refer to the kinds which are usually reduced in

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the blast furnace. Every school boy knows that the bulk of this is technically known as hematite-the stuff that looks like so much earth, as, piled in great heaps in the stock yard, it is scooped up by the big self-filling buckets and carried to the furnace cupola by the trolley of the tramway. Yes, over three-fourths of the millions of tons of pig iron which like liquid fire flow yearly from American furnaces is composed principally of hematite-perhaps brown, perhaps redbut hematite of some sort, a little of another kind being mixed with it occasionally if a certain grade of "pig" is wanted. Hematite is what they are shoveling up from the Superior ranges at the rate of 35,000,000 tons a year. Hematite feeds the furnaces of the South and West. Yet the iron which comes from many of the smelters filled with it is of an inferior grade.

Why does the iron maker use so much hematite? There are two reasons. It is so plentiful and the iron in it can be extracted by the simplest and cheapest

processes. So if the product is not as good as that which was made in the charcoal furnaces of our fathers it pays the smelter better than to make a higher grade of metal unless needed for some purpose where better iron must be had.

But suppose the theories of Mr. Hill and those who agree with him are correct, and that the great banks and beds of hematite are being exhausted, is there not other ore? Yes, mountains of it that would supply every furnace in America for centuries. Why, in the Adirondack mountains alone are deposits which might make northern New York the heart of America's iron industry instead of Pennsylvania and the Ohio valley. Why is it not smelted? Because even in the most modern blast furnace it cannot be reduced to metal profitably, since it contains elements which injure the quality of the iron and are not expelled in the chemical action which takes place. So these inexhaustible stores of ore rich in iron are lying useless, like just so much common earth, at the present time.

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Titaniferous ore, as it is generally called, has been the despair of the iron maker. Found in many parts of the country in such quantities that one bed could keep a score of furnaces in operation, as has been stated, it remains untouched just as fortunes were thrown away in the old days of gold and copper mining before machinery had been invented to separate the metal held in the tailings that passed through the mill. Some of it contains over seventy per cent of pure metal, but run it through the blast furnace and the resulting product usually contains sulphur, sometimes phosphorus in such quantities that it is not fit for use. These elements cannot be entirely removed even by the terrific heat which turns the ore into liquid.

But we may be on the eve of another great industrial revolution. Perhaps we may not need the consumption of the hematite beds, for electricity has come to our aid in trying to solve the problem of making these refractory ores of some good.

During the past year experiments have been made in converting them into iron fit for use, and it can be said at last that

experiments have been entirely successful. While but a few tons of iron were run from the crucible it was practically free from any harmful element and of a remarkably high grade. Considering the many and diversified ways we have utilized electricity it seems strange that the application of its intense heat in separating iron from the baser substances of the ore, has not been successfully undertaken before, since it has the power of generating such an enormous number of heat units. But that it can perform the work can be stated on the authority of the scientist who reduced the oresDr. Heroult, the noted French expert. It may be added that Dr. Eugene Haanel, superintendent of mines for the Canadian government, who witnessed the tests, corroborated Dr. Heroult's statements.

The scene of this notable experiment was Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., where opportunity was offered to secure an ample current voltage from the plant of the Lake Superior Corporation, which generates electricity from water power. With the appropriation of $15,000 generously made by the Dominion government a furnace was designed and con

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