ossible to get a white man
to live at Cold Springs after he could save money enough to get away,
so George was welcomed as assistant superintendent at the Number Eight
Mine, with no salary to speak of and all the work.

In one year everybody had forgotten him. Western men, on the average,
show a higher heart temperature than Eastern men, but they are
tolerably busy people and have their own troubles. "Be patient,"
Morris Blood had said to him. "Sometime there will be more railroad
work in these mountains; then, perhaps, your darned engineering may
come into play. I wish you knew how to sell cigars."

Meantime, McCloud stuck to the mine, and insensibly replaced his
Eastern tissue with Western. In New England he had been carefully
moulded by several generations of gentlemen, but never baked hard. The
mountains put the crust on him. For one thing, the sun and wind, best
of all hemlocks, tanned his white skin into a tough all-American
leather, seasoned his muscles into rawhide sinews, and, without
burdening him with an extra ounce of flesh, sprinkled the red through
his blood till, though thin, he looked apoplectic.

Insensibly, too, something else came about. George McCloud developed
the rarest of all gifts of temperament, even among men of action--the
ability to handle men. In Cold Springs, indeed, it was a case either
of handling or of being handled. McCloud got along with his men and,
with the tough element among them, usually through persuasion; but he
proved, too, that he could inspire confidence even with a club.

One day, coming down "special" from Bear Dance, Gordon Smith, who bore
the nickname Whispering Smith, rode with President Bucks in the
privacy of his car. The day had been long, and the alkali lay light on
the desert. The business in hand had been canvassed, and the troubles
put aside for chicken, coffee, and cigars, when Smith, who did not
smoke, told the story of something he had seen the day before at Cold
Springs that pleased him.

The men in the Number Eight Mine had determined to get rid of some
Italians, and after a good deal of rowing had started in to catch one
of them and hang him. They had chosen a time when McCloud, the
assistant superintendent of the mine, was down with mountain fever. It
was he who had put the Italians into the mine. He had already defended
them from injury, and would be likely, it was known, to do so again if
he were able. On this day a mob had been chasing the Dagos, an