ree days of labor, there would be exactly twenty dollars left. But
Fairchild did not hesitate. To Farrell's office he went and with him
to an interview, in chambers, with the judge. Then, the necessary
permission having been granted, he hurried back to the mine and into
the drift, there to find the last of the muck being scraped away from
beneath the site of the cave-in. Fairchild paid off. Then he turned
to the foreman.

"How many of these men are game to take a chance?"

"Pretty near all of 'em--if there 's any kind of a gamble to it."

"There 's a lot of gamble. I 've got just twenty dollars in my
pocket--enough to pay each man one dollar apiece for a night's work if
my hunch doesn't pan out. If it does pan, the wages are twenty dollars
a day for three days, with everybody, including myself, working like
hell! Who's game?"

The answer came in unison. Fairchild led the way to the chamber,
seized a hammer and took his place.

"There 's two-hundred-dollar ore back of this foot wall if we can break
in and start a new stope," he announced. "It takes a six-foot hole to
reach it, and we can have the whole story by morning. Let's go!"

Along the great length of the foot wall, extending all the distance of
the big chamber, the men began their work, five men to the drills and
as many to the sledges, as they started their double-jacking. Hour
after hour the clanging of steel against steel sounded in the big
underground room, as the drills bit deeper and deeper into the hard
formation of the foot wall, driving steadily forward until their
contact should have a different sound, and the muggy scrapings bear a
darker hue than that of mere wall-rock. Hour after hour passed, while
the drill-turners took their places with the sledges, and the sledgers
went to the drills--the turnabout system of "double-jacking"--with
Fairchild, the eleventh man, filling in along the line as an extra
sledger, that the miners might be the more relieved in their strenuous,
frenzied work. Midnight came. The first of the six-foot drills sank
to its ultimate depth. Then the second and third and fourth: finally
the fifth. They moved on. Hours more of work, and the operation had
been repeated. The workmen hurried for the powder house, far down the
drift, by the shaft, lugging back in their pockets the yellow,
candle-like sticks of dynamite, with their waxy wrappers and their
gelatinous contents together with fuses and caps. Crimping