terward I was the man that dragged him out, and sent a letter up to
Colusa askin' me to come back, but I didn't go. Don't s'pose he'd
remember me now, and don't know as I'd want him to. Any man that works
for Bully comes about as near givin' away his heart's blood as any one
could, and live."

The voices went rumbling on, and Dick sat thinking of the strange,
powerful man of the Rattler.

"Three of the millmen know their business," mumbled Bill, as if all
the time he had been mentally appraising his force. "Two are rumdums.
The chips isn't bad. He could carpenter anywhere, and if he's as
smart a timberman as he is millwright, will make good. The engineer
that's to relieve Bells ain't so much, but I'll leave it to Bells to
cuss him into line. That goes. Two of the Burley men are all right,
and I fired the third in the first hour because he didn't know what
was the nut and which the wrench. Smuts is a gem. He put the
pigeon-blue temper on a bunch of drills as fast as any man could have
done it."

Dick did not answer, but concentrated his mind on the work ahead. The
whistle blew, and he compelled Bill to submit to new bandages,
following the doctor's instructions, and smiled at his steady swearing
as the wrappings were removed and the blisters redressed. They walked
across to the hoist, entered the cage, and felt the sinking sensation
as they were dropped, rather than lowered, to the six-hundred-foot
level. The celerity of the descent almost robbed him of breath, but he
thought of sturdy old Bells' boast, that he had "never run a cage into
the sheaves, nor dropped it to the sump, in forty years of steam."

Lights glowed ahead of them, and they heard hammering. The suck of
fresh air under pressure, vapored like steam, whirled around them in
gusts, and the water oozed and rippled beside their feet as they went
forward. The carpenter was putting in a new set of timbers, and his
task was nearly finished, while beside him waited a drill man and a
swamper with the cumbersome, spiderlike mechanism ready to set. The
carpenter gave a few more blows to a key block, and methodically flung
his hammer into his box and hurried back out through the tunnel toward
the cage, intent on resuming his work at the mill.

Bill tentatively inspected the timbers, tapped the roof with a pick
taken from the swamper's hands, heard the true ring of live rock, and
backed away. The drill was drawn up to the green face of ore.

"About there, I shou