ecame limber. I found myself using very rough language, groaning,
gritting my teeth viciously. But I stayed with the work and held up my
end, while the laymen watched us sedulously, and seemed to grudge us
even a moment to wipe the sweat out of our blinded eyes.

I was glad, indeed, when, on the evening of the third day, Ribwood came
to me and said:

"I guess you'd better work up at the shaft to-morrow. We want a man to
wheel muck."

They had a shaft sunk on the hillside. They were down some forty feet
and were drifting in, wheeling the pay-dirt down a series of planks
placed on trestles to the dump. I gripped the handles of a wheelbarrow
loaded to overspilling, and steered it down that long, unsteady gangway
full of uneven joins and sudden angles. Time and again I ran off the
track, but after the first day I became quite an expert at the business.
My spirits rose. I was on the way of becoming a miner.

CHAPTER IX

Turning the windlass over the shaft was a little, tough mud-rat, who
excited in me the liveliest sense of aversion. Pat Doogan was his name,
but I will call him the "Worm."

The Worm was the foulest-mouthed specimen I have yet met. He had the
lowest forehead I have ever seen in a white man, and such a sharp,
ferrety little face. His reddish hair had the prison clip, and his
little reddish eyes were alive with craft and cruelty. I noticed he
always regarded me with a peculiarly evil grin, that wrinkled up his
cheeks and revealed his hideously blackened teeth. From the first he
gave me a creepy feeling, a disgust as if I were near some slimy
reptile.

Yet the Worm tried to make up to me. He would tell me stories blended of
the horrible and the grotesque. One in particular I remember.

"Youse wanta know how I lost me last job. I'll tell youse. You see, it
was like dis. Dere was two Blackmoor guys dat got into de country dis
Spring; came by St. Michaels; Hindoos dey was. One of dem 'Sicks' (an'
dey looked sick, dey was so loose an' weary in der style) got a job from
old man Gustafson down de shaft muckin' up and fillin' de buckets.

"Well, dere was dat Blackmoor down in de deep hole one day when I comes
along, an' strikes old Gus for a job. So, seein' as de man on de
windlass wanted to quit, he passed it up to me, an' I took right hold
an' started in.

"Say, I was feelin' powerful mean. I'd just finished up a two weeks'
drunk, an' you tink de booze wasn't workin' in me some. I was seein' all