ed. "This tin-basin trot's sure getting on
my nerves, as the fella said. We'd ought to have the shaft-house and
machinery set up and going, this minute, and a good, husky bunch of men
at work in that hole, digging out dollars where we're scratching for
pennies."

"I don't want to be the shy man of this outfit," Barrett put it
quickly. "We can have the machinery if you fellows think we dare use
the money to buy it."

Gifford and I both said No, deferring to Barrett's better judgment.
And since this talk was getting us nowhere and was wasting time which
was worth ten dollars a minute, we broke it off and went to work.

It was in the latter part of this third week, on a night when my turn
at the wagon guarding had come in regular course, that I was made to
understand that no leaf in the book of a man's life can be so firmly
pasted down that a mere chance thumbing of the pages by an alien hand
may not flip it back again.

By imperceptible inchings we had been starting the wagon earlier and
earlier on each successive trip; and on the evening in question it was
no later than ten o'clock when I turned the consignment of ore over to
the foreman at the reduction works. Ordinarily, I should have taken
the road back to the hills at once, intent only upon getting to camp
and between the blankets as speedily as possible. But on this night a
spirit of restlessness got hold of me, and, leaving Barrett's shotgun
in the sampling works office, I strolled up-town.

Inasmuch as a three-months' residence in a mining-camp is the full
equivalent of as many years spent in a region where introductions
precede acquaintance, I was practically certain to meet somebody I
knew. The somebody in this instance proved to be one Patrick Carmody,
formerly a hard-rock boss on the Midland branch construction, and now
the working superintendent of a company which was driving a huge
drainage tunnel under a group of the big mines of the district.

The meeting-place was the lobby of the hotel, and at the Irishman's
invitation I sat with him to smoke a comradely cigar. Carmody was not
pointedly inquisitive as to my doings; was content to be told that I
had been "prospecting around." Beyond that he was good-naturedly
willing to talk of the stupendous undertaking over which he was
presiding, expatiating enthusiastically upon air-drill performance,
porphyry shooting, the merits of various kinds of high explosives,
deep-mine ventilation, and the like.