k under him. I resign here and now."

"You what--" cried Clay, "you resign?"

He whirled his horse round with a dig of his spur and faced them.

"How dare you talk of resigning? I'll pack the whole lot of you back
to New York on the first steamer, if I want to, and I'll give you such
characters that you'll be glad to get a job carrying a transit. You're
in no position to talk of resigning yet--not one of you. Yes," he
added, interrupting himself, "one of you is MacWilliams, the man who
had charge of the railroad. It's no fault of his that the road's not
working. I understand that he couldn't get the right of way from the
people who owned the land, but I have seen what he has done, and his
plans, and I apologize to him--to MacWilliams. As for the rest of you,
I'll give you a month's trial. It will be a month before the next
steamer could get here anyway, and I'll give you that long to redeem
yourselves. At the end of that time we will have another talk, but you
are here now only on your good behavior and on my sufferance.
Good-morning."

As Clay had boasted, he was not the man to throw up his position
because he found the part he had to play was not that of leading man,
but rather one of general utility, and although it had been several
years since it had been part of his duties to oversee the setting up of
machinery, and the policing of a mining camp, he threw himself as
earnestly into the work before him as though to show his subordinates
that it did not matter who did the work, so long as it was done. The
men at first were sulky, resentful, and suspicious, but they could not
long resist the fact that Clay was doing the work of five men and five
different kinds of work, not only without grumbling, but apparently
with the keenest pleasure.

He conciliated the rich coffee planters who owned the land which he
wanted for the freight road by calls of the most formal state and
dinners of much less formality, for he saw that the iron mine had its
social as well as its political side. And with this fact in mind, he
opened the railroad with great ceremony, and much music and feasting,
and the first piece of ore taken out of the mine was presented to the
wife of the Minister of the Interior in a cluster of diamonds, which
made the wives of the other members of the Cabinet regret that their
husbands had not chosen that portfolio. Six months followed of hard,
unremitting work, during which time the great pier grew