looking for a job. When he said to the office boys, "I want
to see the man who has charge of hiring the hands," they told him to
wait a while in a tone of voice which he had never before encountered.
His blood flamed hot in an instant over their calm insolence. Eventually
he found his way into a room where a surly fat man sat writing. He
looked up over his shoulder and snarled out:

"Well, what is it? What do you want?"

Harold controlled himself and replied: "I want to get a job; I'm a
cattleman from Colorado, and I'd like----"

"I don't care where you're from; we've got all the men we want. See Mr.
White, don't come bothering me."

Harold put his hand on the man's shoulder with the gesture of an angry
leopard, and a yellow glare filled his eyes, from which the brutal boss
shrank as if from a flame.

With a powerful effort he pulled himself up short and said: "Treat the
next cattleman that comes your way a little more decent or you'll get a
part of your lung carried away. Good day."

He walked out with the old familiar numbness in his body and the red
flashes wavering before his eyes. His brain was in tumult. The free man
of the mountain had come in contact with "the tyrant of labor," and it
was well for the big beast that Harold was for the moment without his
gun.

Going back to his room he took out his revolver and loaded every
chamber. In the set of his lips was menace to the next employer who
dared to insult and degrade him.

In the days that followed he wandered over the city, with eyes that took
note of every group of workmen. He could not bring himself to go back to
the stockyards, there was danger of his becoming a murderer if he did;
and as he approached the various bosses of the gangs of men in the
street, he found himself again and again without the resolution to touch
his hat and ask for a job. Once or twice he saw others quite as brutally
rebuffed as he had been, and it was only by turning away that he kept
himself from taking a hand in an encounter. Once or twice, when the
overseer happened to be a decent and sociable fellow, Harold, edging
near, caught his eye and was able to address him on terms of equality;
but in each case the talk which followed brought out the fact that men
were swarming for every place; indeed Harold could see this for himself.
Ultimately he fell into the ranks of poor, shivering, hollow-cheeked
fellows who stood around wistfully watching the excavation of cellars or
han