"They sure are," agreed the other with emphasis, "Have another shot," he shoved the decanter toward the younger man and leaned closer: "Say Mr. Brent, you ain't—er, you don't need a little change, do you? If you do just say so, you're welcome to it." The man drew forth a roll of bills, but Brent shook his head:
"No thanks. You can cash this check for me though. Jepson was square enough about it—paid me in full to date and threw in a month's salary in advance. I don't blame him any. We quit the best of friends. When he hired me he knew I liked a little drink now and then, so I took the job with the understanding that if the outfit ever lost a dollar because of my boozing, I was through right then."
"What was it flooded the tunnels?"
"Water," grinned Brent.
"Oh," laughed the bartender, "I thought maybe it was booze."
"You'd have thought so all the more if you'd been there this morning to hear the temperance lecture that old Jepson threw in gratis along with that extra month's pay. About the tunnels—we get our power from Anaconda, and something happened to the high tension wire, and the pumps stopped, and there wasn't any light, and Number Four and Number Six are wet tunnels anyway so they filled up and drowned two batteries of drills. Then, instead of rigging a steam pump and pumping them out through Number Four, one of the shift bosses rigged a fifteen inch rotary in Number Six and started her going full tilt with the result that he ran the water down against that new piece of railroad grade and washed about fifty feet of it into the river and left the track hanging in the air by the rails."
"The damn fool!"
"Oh, I don't know. He did the best he could. A shift boss isn't hired to think."
"What did old Jepson fire you for? He didn't think you clim up an' cut the high tension wire did he? Or, did he expect you to set around nights an' keep the juice flowin'?"
Brent laughed: "Not exactly. But they tried to find me and couldn't. So when I showed up