nous
distrust of her that she, or Marcia, had put into my head. But that day
went by, and two more on top of it, and I had no chance to speak to
Paulette Brown.

Part of the reason was that I had not a second to call my own. La Chance
had been an amateur mine when we began it, and it was one still. There
was only Dudley--who did nothing, and was celebrating himself stupid
with drugs, or I was much mistaken--Macartney, and myself to run it;
with not enough men even to get out the ore, without working the mill
and the amalgam plates. It had been no particular matter while the whole
mine was only a tentative business, and I had been having half a fit at
Dudley's mad extravagance in putting up a ten-stamp mill when we had
nothing particular to crush in it. But now, with ore that ran over a
hundred to the ton being fed into the mill, and Macartney and I doing
the work of six men instead of two, I agreed with Dudley when he
announced in a sober interval that we required a double shift of men and
the mill to crush day and night, instead of stopping at dark,--besides a
cyanide plant and a man to run it.

But Macartney unexpectedly jibbed at the idea. He returned bluntly that
he could attend to the cyanide business himself, when it was really
needed; while as to extra men he could not watch a night shift at the
plates as well as a day one, and he would have to be pretty sure of the
honesty of his new amalgam man before he started in to get one.
Also--and it struck me as a sentiment I had never heard from a mine
superintendent before--that if we sent out for men half of those we got
might be riffraff and make trouble for us, without so much as a sheriff
within a hundred miles. "I'd sooner pick up new men one at a time," he
concluded, "even if it takes a month. We've ladies here, and if we got
in a gang of tramps----" he gave a shrug and a significant glance at
Dudley.

"Why, we've some devils out of purgatory now," I began scornfully, and
stopped,--because Dudley suddenly agreed with Macartney. But the waste
of time in making the mine pay for itself and the stopping of the mill
at night galled me; and so did the work I had to do from dawn to dark,
because any two-dollar-a-day man could have done it instead.

Macartney seemed to be made of iron, for he took longer hours than I
did. But he could talk to Marcia Wilbraham in the evenings, while Dudley
stood between me and the dream girl I thought had come true for me when
first