When a
fellow brings a wife home, he wants the old place lookin' slick.
Good-day, Job. See yer again."

Job made no reply, but a lump came into his throat. He stood and
stared, and then turned in an absent-minded way and bent his head over
the great ledger, though he seemed not to care which page opened. Jane
to marry Dan! Was that what he had meant? Had it come to that? Once
Job had not cared, but now the thought made him wild. Could it be
true? Jane to marry Dan Dean! Better she were dead. Job felt he could
see her carried to the grave with less sorrow than to see her Dan's
wife.

* * * * *

It was very strange how Job came to be the preacher at the Yellow
Jacket mine. Not that he ever put on clerical garb or deserted the
office or was anything more than a plain, every-day Christian. Yet
there came a time when in the eyes of those rough miners, with hearts
far more tender than one would think from their exterior--and not only
in their eyes, but in those of the few wives and the half-clad
children who played on the waste heap--Job came to be called "The
Reverend," and looked up to as a spiritual leader.

It was the day that he went down to the eight-hundred-foot level that
it began. He well remembered it. Up to the left of the stamp-mill, not
far from the main office, was a square, red-painted building, up whose
steps, just as the bell in the brick store's tower struck the set
time, a procession of clean-faced miners went in and a procession of
grimy ones came out. It was at the one o'clock shift that Job went in
that day, watched the men hang their coats on what seemed to him an
endless line of pegs, take their stand one by one on the little
platform which stood in the center of the floor like a trap-door,
grasp the iron-bar above them, and at the tinkling of a bell vanish
suddenly down into darkness out of sight.

It was the first time Job had been down the mine. The sight of the
constantly-disappearing figures on the cage that came and went did not
encourage him to go, but soon it was his turn. One of the men he knew
grasped one side of the bar of the trapeze over him, one the other,
the bell tinkled, and down he dropped with a jump that almost took his
breath; down past long, subterranean tunnels of arched rock, which,
from the heat he felt from them, and the blinding glare of the lights,
seemed to him like the furnaces of Vulcan. Further still he dropped to
the eight-hundred-