hold of her heart; and, lingering at
sundown in the same old doorway, the tears filling her eyes, she took
them both in--Dan to pity, comfort, cheer; Job to honor and to love.
Job was hers; perhaps he would never know it, but that day she gave
him the best a woman has--her first love.

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CHAPTER XX.

ACROSS THE MONTHS.

The next two years came and went in Grizzly county without any events
to be chronicled in the city press--no strikes or rich finds or
stirring deeds; yet they were years that counted much in some lives.

Job went back to the mines, no longer behind the pay window, but as
assistant superintendent. Never had so young a man had so responsible
a place at the Yellow Jacket. The negotiations and intercourse with
the outside world, and the complicated plans of a great company, were
not his task. He was the soul of the mine. His it was to deal with the
"hands," and stand between them and that intangible, soulless thing
men call a corporation. He was the prophet of the company and priest
pleading the needs of five hundred men at the doors of the directors.
There was nothing in the laws of the company defining his position,
and he could hardly have defined it himself. He only knew that he was
there to make life a little brighter, home a little more sacred, the
friction of business a little less, the higher part of manhood more
valuable, to five hundred hard-working men of all creeds and races
that lived on the bare mountain-side about the Yellow Jacket mine.

It was marvelous the changes that came. Personal influence and social
power told as the days went by. The saloon-keepers felt it and
grumbled, but the assistant superintendent was too great a favorite
for them to dare say much. The Sunday work ceased. Every improvement
for bettering the conditions under which the men worked was put
in--better air-pumps; a large shaft-house with dressing-rooms for the
men, to save them from going out while heated, to be exposed to
winter's cold; a hospital for the sick; lower prices at the company's
store; Finnegan's saloon enlarged and fitted up as a temperance
club-house, with not a drop of liquor, but plenty of good cheer. More
than once on Sundays Job talked to the men on eternal themes, from a
spot where, on a never-to-be-forgotten Sunday, he had once faced a
mob.

At last the company built a large, plain, attractive church, and the
miners insisted on Job's being the "parson."