A tightly observed portrait of an inland industrial town where narrow-gauge tracks, smelting furnaces, and frequent blasts shape daily existence and community rituals. A local narrator recounts the town’s three districts and the hardships of workers and families, emphasizing accidents, poverty, and the nightly cinder flare the townspeople call the eye of God. Interwoven episodes follow personal ambitions and moral tensions—particularly surrounding Emma Butte’s marriage to August Jarlsen—alongside schemes, domestic rupture, and escalating labor conflict that culminates in a strike and a concluding epilogue.