"'As scarlet'—yet—'white—as snow.' Is that it, Job?" whispered Sam. "Oh, yes, that's it! They're gone. Job—the devil's lost his mortgage. Let me pray, Job. It's the prayer mother said for me when 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 smoke-stacks belching forth their black clouds; the big buildings about them; the great heap of waste stuff at the right; the dump-cars running out and back; the miners' shanties bare and brown on the left, running up the hillside, hugging the break-neck steeps; the handsome house on the south which he knew must be the superintendent's home; the tall, ungainly brick structure of the company's store in the heart of things; the far-off thump, thump, and the ceaseless roar of the machinery—all this made a deep impression on Job.