ine among
the employers in the district, and intuitively he felt the
resistlessness of the power. But he did not shrink. He advised his
owners to join the combination as a business proposition. But his advice
was a dead fly fed to the old spider's senile vanity. For Daniel Sands
had been able to dictate as a part of his acceptance of the proposition,
this one concession: That the Independent mine be kept out of the
agreement. Nathan Perry suspected this. But most of his owners were game
men, and they decided not even to apply for admission to the
organization. They found that the young man's management of the mine was
paying well; that the labor problem was working satisfactorily; that the
safety devices, while expensive, produced a feeling of good-will among
the men that was worth more even in dividends than the interest on the
money.

But after he had warned his employers of the wrath to come, Nathan Perry
did not spend much time in unavailing regret at their decision. He was,
upon the whole, glad they had made it. And having a serious problem in
philology to work out--namely, to discover whether Esperanto, Chinese or
Dutch is the natural language of man, through study of the
conversational tendencies of Daniel Kyle Perry, the young superintendent
of the Independent mine gave serious thought to that problem.

Then, of course, there was that other problem that bothered Nathan
Perry, and being an engineer with a degree of B. S., it annoyed him to
discover that the problem wouldn't come out straight. Briefly and
popularly stated, it is this: If you have a boiler capacity of 200
pounds per square inch and love a girl 200 pounds to the square inch,
and then the Doctor in his black bag brings one fat, sweaty, wrinkled
baby, and you see the girl in a new and sweeter light than ever before,
see her in a thousand ways rising above her former stature to a
wonderful womanhood beyond even your dreams--how are you going to get
more capacity out of that boiler without breaking it, when the load
calls for four hundred pounds? Now these problems puzzled the young man,
living at that time in his eight-room house with a bath, and he sat up
nights to work them. And some times there were two heads at work on the
sums, and once in a while three heads, but the third head talked a
various language, whose mild and healing sympathy stole the puzzle from
the problem and began chewing on it before they were aware. So Nathan
put the troubles o