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"There is none, not even the poor manufacturer of resin in the midst of his pine forests, nor the miserable miner in his dark dwelling, but who would enjoy an increase of salary and of comforts.
The answer was in the affirmative. A miner stretched out a foot and surveyed it studiously. "Ain't seen him since about five o'clock," he said at last. "He was just starting up to the mine then." "To the mine? That late? Are you sure?" "Well I dunno. May have been going to Center City. Can't say.
In that moment of shock his grip on the revolver was broken. In the next moment he felt a smashing darkness descend upon his brain, and in the midst of the darkness even the darkness ceased. But the pocket-miner fired again and again, until the revolver was empty. Then he tossed it from him and, breathing heavily, sat down on the dead man's legs. The miner was sobbing and struggling for breath.
The gamblers at the cards were silent, in strange contrast with the others; and in each group was at least one dark-garbed, hard-eyed gambler who was not a miner. Joan saw boys not yet of age, flushed and haggard, wild with the frenzy of winning and cast down in defeat. There were jovial, grizzled, old prospectors to whom this scene and company were pleasant reminders of bygone days.
Janki Meah had been blind for the thirty years during which he had served the Jimahari Collieries with pick and crowbar. All through those thirty years he had regularly, every morning before going down, drawn from the overseer his allowance of lamp-oil just as if he had been an eyed miner. What Kundoo's gang resented, as hundreds of gangs had resented before, was Janki Meah's selfishness.
One would hate to think of the risks of the Long Trail, for miners from Old Mexico to Fort Leavenworth, for cowboys from Fort Worth to Wyoming and St. Louis, and not see the risks rewarded in fortunes to these trail makers. The cowboy and miner of the olden days the cowboy and miner who survived, that is are the capitalists taking their pleasure in San Antonio to-day.
Searching and searching, up hill and down, lighting his way through the brush, the miner went on and on, to leave no spot unvisited.
"If the old miner told them of the Cave of Gold and the skin map, and he said he did, they sure will be on the lookout for the party with the map; and it wouldn't take much inquiring for them to find out that it was us that brought the dead miner home; and then, I reckon, it won't take them two minutes to guess what started us so sudden-like for the mines.
While the movement of the crank is on its turning point, the miner passes from the step on which he is standing to the opposite step of the other.
"But," objected Grace in dismay, "if he is mad, he won't listen, and he will come here and attack me." "If he does," said Hope, simply, "I must kill him, that's all." Burnley, however, in point of fact, kept more and more aloof for many hours; he never left his work till he laid bare the whole body of that miner, and found a pickaxe in his dead hand.
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