The warm sunlight poured through the dingy windows of the office, and filled the dark room with a sort of sombre glory.  The atmosphere of Slivers’ office was thick and dusty, and the sun made long beams of light through the heavy air.  Slivers had pushed all the scrip and loose papers away, and was writing a letter in the little clearing caused by their removal.  On the old-fashioned inkstand was a paper full of grains of gold, and on this the sunlight rested, making it glitter in the obscurity of the room.  Billy, seated on Slivers’ shoulder, was astonished at this, and, inspired by a spirit of adventure, he climbed down and waddled clumsily across the table to the inkstand, where he seized a small nugget in his beak and made off with it.  Slivers looked up from his writing suddenly:  so, being detected, Billy stopped and looked at him, still carrying the nugget in his beak.

‘Drop it,’ said Slivers severely, in his rasping little voice.  Billy pretended not to understand, and after eyeing Slivers for a moment or two resumed his journey.  Slivers stretched out his hand for the ruler, whereupon Billy, becoming alive to his danger, dropped the nugget, and flew down off the table with a discordant shriek.

‘Devil! devil! devil!’ screamed this amiable bird, flopping up and down on the floor.  ‘You’re a liar!  You’re a liar!  Pickles.’

Having delivered himself of this bad language, Billy waddled to his master’s chair, and climbing up by the aid of his claws and beak, soon established himself in his old position.  Slivers, however, was not attending to him, as he was leaning back in his chair drumming in an absent sort of way with his lean fingers on the table.  His cork arm hung down limply, and his one eye was fixed on a letter lying in front of him.  This was a communication from the manager of the Pactolus Mine requesting Slivers to get him more hands, and Slivers’ thoughts had wandered away from the letter to the person who wrote it, and from thence to Madame Midas.

‘She’s a clever woman,’ observed Slivers, at length, in a musing sort of tone, ’and she’s got a good thing on in that claim if she only strikes the Lead.’

‘Devil,’ said Billy once more, in a harsh voice.

‘Exactly,’ answered Slivers, ’the Devil’s Lead.  Oh, Lord! what a fool I was not to have collared that ground before she did; but that infernal McIntosh never would tell me where the place was.  Never mind, I’ll be even with him yet; curse him.’

His expression of face was not pleasant as he said this, and he grasped the letter in front of him in a violent way, as if he were wishing his long fingers were round the writer’s throat.  Tapping with his wooden leg on the floor, he was about to recommence his musings, when he heard a step in the passage, and the door of his office being pushed violently open, a man entered without further ceremony, and flung himself down on a chair near the window.