ot Ratowsky's doings. There was some one else behind the scenes
who provided the brains and money to keep the business moving. Dennis
O'Day meant to find out who that person was and square accounts with him.
But for three years he had been no nearer the truth than now. To learn
anything from Ratowsky was impossible, for the man had a tied tongue when
he chose.

In the midst of all the dirt and squalor there was one touch of dainty
hominess and comfort. This was found near Mountain Glen, where the
superintendent of the mines lived. The house was an unpretentious wooden
building with great porches and big, airy rooms, but the windows shone in
the sunlight, the curtains were white as snow, and the worn floors of the
porches were always scrubbed.

In front and at the sides of the house was a lawn mowed until it looked
like a stretch of moss. Masses of scarlet sage and cannas grew near the
house, while at the rear a white-washed fence gleamed white.

The superintendency of the Bitumen mines was not the most desirable
position, cutting off, as it did, the man and his family from all
congenial companionship. The salary attached was fairly good, quite
sufficient to provide a comfortable, if not luxurious, living. The present
incumbent had begun his profession with other ambitions than living in a
little mining town.

Twenty years before, Mr. Hobart, then newly married, had every prospect of
becoming prominent in his profession. He had new theories on mining and
mine-explosives. He had brought to perfection a substance to destroy the
explosive gas which collects in unused chambers of mines.

Just at the time when the mining interests were about to make use of his
discovery, his health failed from too close application. He was threatened
with consumption, brought about by inhaling poisonous gases. He was
ordered from the laboratory into the mountains. The Kettle Creek Mining
Company offered him a position at Bitumen, one of the highest soft coal
regions in the world. The air was bracing and suited to his physical
condition. Confident that a few months would find him restored to health,
he accepted. But with each attempted return to lower altitudes the enemy
came back, and months passed into years, until he came to look upon
Bitumen as the scene for his life work.

Here his only child, Elizabeth, was born. Here she grew into girlhood,
knowing no companionship except that of her parents and Miss Hale, a woman
past middle age,