BILL AND THE TAME BANDITS
Bill stood on the top step of the front porch, looking down into the scowling faces of a committee of workmen from the mine. Seamed, not too clean some of them, hard-eyed every one, they stood looking up at him, measuring as they were being measured. He had seen them coming up the hill, had thought some accident had happened, had come to meet them. There he stopped short, on guard. He had seen miners' committees before now. They needed no banner to announce their kind and purpose.
"Come in, boys," he said, when the silence became marked. "You seem to have something on your chests."
He turned to the door, and they followed him, saying nothing. That in itself was of unfriendly portent. Many of these men he knew by sight, a few had speaking acquaintance with him. He had returned the evening before from the Coast, and he felt a swift desire for a full record of the day since he had left Parowan. Something must have happened, some grievance of which he was wholly in ignorance must have arisen in his absence.
Bill saw how they stared around at the beautiful room, and looked at one another afterwards with a grim significance. He stiffened mentally.
"All right, now, let's have it—since you are here. But the office is the proper place for business, you know. Why didn't you go there?"
"It's you we want to see this morning, Mr. Dale," a small, shrewd-faced man said quietly. "Mr. Rayfield and Mr. Emmett have done all they can for us. We'll have to talk straight from the shoulder, now, so we came to the man who's responsible."
"All right." Bill sat down and crossed one leg over the other,—a habit of which Doris did not approve. "Responsible for what?"
"For getting away with the money, so our wages haven't been paid this month. And so the company can't go ahead and find the ore again. The boss has done his best. He's proved that. When the Company failed to meet the payroll, Mr. Rayfield and Mr. Emmett lent a lot of the boys money out of their own pockets to tide things over. And we had just stood a cut in wages——"