ot, indeed, desperate. With any skilled leader to direct
the mob, the refuge sought by the defence would already have been
ruined. The office building, made of hewn logs laid horizontally and
with possible view of defence, had been placed at the brow of the slope
on one side and near the mouth of the mine on the other. Later,
however, rude structures of unplaned pine sprung up--compressor-plant,
blacksmith-shop, and the like--about it, no one of them strong enough
to serve as a fort, and all of them a menace now because they screened
the approaches on two sides and could be fired in a dozen places.

And now that Graham and Nolan were here to aid, this defect was noticed
at once.

"This won't do at all, Mr. Cawker," said Graham, as he sprung the lever
of a new Winchester and glanced into the chamber. "We'll be surrounded
and burned out of here in ten minutes. We've got to occupy those
others, too."

Cawker stared at the "young feller" with angering eyes. A moment agone
and he was praising his daring, but that astonishing tone of authority
nettled him. What business had a railway fireman telling him, a mine
manager, what to do in case of a row?

"_You_ get to a loop-hole and 'tend to that," snapped he. "I'll 'tend
to my business," and he turned to Long Nolan, just heaving up from a
peep-hole, for support and approval. Nolan he knew for a soldier of
old. He had learned to respect him quite as much as he jealously
feared, and Nolan's answer took him utterly aback:

"You do as he tells you and do it quick. He knows his business better'n
ever you'll begin to know yours."

CHAPTER XI

A NIGHT ON GUARD

Two minutes more, with eight men to back him, George Graham was
knocking or sawing out holes in the blacksmith-shop, and presently a
man with a reliable Winchester was crouched by each opening watching
the next move of the foe. The shop was perched at the edge of a
flat-topped "dump", commanding the rocky slopes to the roadway on one
side, the hill on the other. It was exposed to shots from below, yet
the hardest to reach by direct assault. In the larger building a bit
farther back, the compressor-house, Cawker and four others were
stationed, guarding the approach from the north. The manager had taken
Nolan's broad hint, and the subsequent orders, with one long look of
amaze, then with the light of comprehension in his eyes and the
silence of consent on his lips. Did he not know that the main charge
against No