I was a
little boy; it's the prayer Andy Malden said at his lad's grave; it's
my prayer now:

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
And if--if--"

The low, quavering voice ceased, a smile came over the white face, the
wind was hushed without, the stars struggled through the clouds.
Yankee Sam was dead, and peace had come back into Job Malden's soul.

CHAPTER XV.

THE YELLOW JACKET MINE.

The next fall Mr. Malden got Job the place of assistant cashier at the
Yellow Jacket Mine. His staunch character, his local fame as a student
at the Frost Creek school, and his general manly bearing, added to Mr.
Malden's influence in the county, won him the place when the former
assistant left for the East. Andrew Malden thought it would be a good
experience for a young man like Job, and perhaps would open the way to
something better than a lumber mill and a timber and stock ranch.

The Yellow Jacket Mine was one of the oldest and most famous in the
whole country. It was the very day they sighted the ship off Telegraph
Hill that brought the news into 'Frisco Bay that California was
admitted as a State, that gold was discovered in Yellow Jacket Creek,
where, when the rush came some days later, the men said they didn't
know which was most plenty--yellow jackets in the air, or yellow
jackets in the gravel bed of the creek as it lay dry and bare in the
summer sun.

At last the creek bed had been washed over and over till the
red-shirted miners could find not one nugget more, and the Yellow
Jacket was deserted. Then one day a poor stranded fellow, who came in
too late to make enough to get out, was digging a well, and found
quartz down deep and a streak of gold in it. That was the beginning of
the real fame of the Yellow Jacket. A company bought it up, machinery
was put in, and now, in Job Malden's day, the stamp mills and deep
tunnels of the mine kept five hundred men busy in shifts that never
ceased night or day.

Job never forgot the first day he went there as assistant cashier. He
had seen it all before, but when one is a sort of "partner" in a firm,
it looks different to one. And so it did to Job, as, after a long ride
with Tony in the buckboard down the Frost Creek road, up past Mike
Hennessy's, down and up and across Rattlesnake Gulch, and over the
heavily timbered mountain, a bend in the road brought him in full view
of the Yellow Jacket on the bare hillside opposite. The tall