gain consulting with
engineers and foremen in charge. Light was breaking in the sky before
he stepped from the cage of the Jack Pot and boarded a street-car for
his rooms. Cornishmen and Hungarians and Americans, going with their
dinner-buckets to work, met him and received each a nod or a word of
greeting from this splendidly built young Hermes in miners' slops, who
was to many of them, in their fancy, a deliverer from the slavery which
the Consolidated was ready to force upon them.

Once at his rooms, Ridgway took a cold bath, dressed carefully,
breakfasted, and was ready to plunge into the mass of work which had
accumulated during his absence at the mining camp of Alpine and the
subsequent period while he was snowbound. These his keen, practical
mind grasped and disposed of in crisp sentences. To his private
secretary he rapped out order sharply and decisively.

"Phone Ballard and Dalton I want to see them at once. Tell Murphy I
won't talk with him. What I said before I left was final. Write
Cadwallader we can't do business on the terms he proposes, but add that
I'm willing to continue his Mary Kinney lease. Dictate a letter to
Riley's lawyer, telling him I can't afford to put a premium on
incompetence and negligence; that if his client was injured in the Jack
Pot explosion, he has nobody but himself to blame for it. Otherwise, of
course, I should be glad to pension him. Let me see the letter before
you send it. I don't want anything said that will offend the union.
Have two tons of good coal sent up to Riley's house, and notify his
grocer that all bills for the next three months may be charged to me.
And, Smythe, ask Mr. Eaton to step this way."

Stephen Eaton, an alert, clear-eyed young fellow who served as fidus
Achates to Ridgway, and was the secretary and treasurer of the Mesa
Ore-producing Company, took the seat Smythe had vacated. He was
good-looking, after a boyish, undistinguished fashion, but one disposed
to be critical might have voted the chin not quite definite enough. He
had been a clerk of the Consolidated, working for one hundred dollars a
month, when Ridgway picked him out and set his feet in the way of
fortune. He had done this out of personal liking, and, in return, the
subordinate was frankly devoted to his chief.

"Steve, my opinion is that Alpine is a false alarm. Unless I guess
wrong, it is merely a surface proposition and low-grade at that."

"Miller says--"

"Yes, I know what Miller sa