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-foot level, where he stepped off in a narrow cavern dimly lighted and stretching away into the distant darkness. Oh, how hot it was! The brawny, white-chested miners had thrown off all clothing but their trousers, and were dividing their time between mighty blows on the great solid rocks, and the air-shaft and tub of water, where every few minutes they had to go and bathe lungs and face. The sound of the picks, the rattle of the ore cars bringing the stuff to be hauled up the shaft, the steady thump, thump, of the pumps removing the water from the lower levels, the intermittent drop and rise of the cage, filled the weird place with strange sounds.
Job had delivered his message to the "boss" of the tunnel and was hurrying back to the cage, when a half-naked miner, all stained with the ever-dripping ooze from above, stopped him and said:
"Be ye the faither that prayed Yankee Sam t'rough?"
"Why—yes, and no," answered Job. "I was with Yankee Sam when he died, but I'm no priest or parson."
"Aye, I said to Pat it was ye as ye went down, priest or not. I've heard of ye, and the mon that could shrive Yankee Sam is a good enough priest for any mon. Now, me boy Tim is dying, the only son of his mother, and she in her grave. And Tim and me, we live alone in the hut back of Finnigan's saloon. Tim's a frail lad. He would work in the mines, and the hot air in this place and the cold air whin he wint up gave him the lung faver, and the doctor says he's got to go. The next shift I'm going up to him. Meet me at the pump-house. Don't tell him yez is not a priest; it's all the same to him, and he'll die aisier if he thinks the faither's come. Poor Tim, me only boy!"
What could Job do but consent? What could he do late that afternoon but meet the broken-hearted Irish father at the pump-house and climb the steep street to Finnigan's, and go in back to the poor hut that the miner called home?
On a low, matted bed of straw and a torn blanket or two, in a corner of the dismal shanty, through which the cold winds swept, lay Tim, dying. The hectic flush was on his thin cheek, the glaze of death seemed in his eye. He reached his wan hand to Job. A lad of sixteen he was, but no more years of life were there for him.