hinted at before--quite an
undertaking for one man, considering the timbering and all.

It must have been a miner who wrote, that hope springs eternal in the
human breast. Surely in no place other than the mines is the fact so
manifest. There was once a man seventy-three years old who was sinking
through a cap of cement two hundred feet thick. The stuff was just this
side of powderwork, barely to be loosened with a pick. The old man had to
climb down sixty feet of ladder, fill his bucket, climb up again and dump
it, and so on and so on and so on. Besides, he had to walk thirty miles
and back again with his load, whenever he ran out of provisions. It had
taken him a year to put his shaft down the sixty feet. There was one
hundred and forty more to go, each foot getting harder, the Lord only
knew what would be at the bottom when he got there; yet to sit in that
old man's cabin for an hour was to obtain a complete exposition of the
theory and practice of optimism. It is an unbelievable story and would be
senseless, were it not entirely true.

Beside that effort, Jim's task took on the tint of an avocation, but the
man who runs six hundred feet of tunnel single-handed earns whatever may
be at the end of it.

The tunnel was the one thing that Ches abhorred in his new surroundings.
Whether it was that it reminded him of the dingy holes of his city life,
or whether it was a natural antipathy, Ches was one of those who can
never enter a confined space without the sensation of smothering--at any
rate, neither argument nor coaxing could get him to put a foot within its
dark mouth.

An old miner would have shared his feelings in this instance, for Jim, so
thorough in some things, was a careless workman. Your old miner would
have shaken his head at the weak caps and recklessly driven lagging;
frames out of plumb and made of any stick that came to hand--more
especially as they were to support loose dirt of the most treacherous
sort.

Ches worked outside, dumping the car that Jim had made of four tree
sections for wheels, and sluice-box boards for sides. Jim, the ingenious,
had rigged up a pulley system, whereby Ches could run the car out and in
without interrupting the work on the face.

It was hard labor for Ches at first, but he gritted his teeth and stuck
it out manfully.

"Bime-by," he would say to himself, "I'll have er muscle on me like Jim,
an' den I'll yank dis cussed ol' car right out in der middle of der
crik," an