As he spoke he glanced at the larger of Ross’s trunks.
If Amos Steele understood one subject better than mining operations, that one subject was men. He saw in Ross an overgrown, homesick boy, with a stout but untested "backbone."
"And I wonder," thought Steele, "how far that backbone is going to take him when it gets a healthy development, and–how far is he goin’ to develop it?"
Furthermore, Steele concluded, Ross was more accustomed to bending over a book than over a shovel; and he shrugged his shoulders at the thought of the Weimer-Grant claims.
"His backbone can’t do everything," he decided, "no matter how stout it grows, especially when Weimer has lost his."
Steele’s shack was at the foot of Gale’s Ridge. Half-way up the mountainside was another and larger shack, where his miners, thirty in number, ate. Above that was the "bunk-house" where they slept. And yet higher up was the mouth of the tunnel out of which the Gale’s Ridge Mining Company expected to pull vast wealth when the Burlington Road had done its part.
"I’d rather bach it," Steele explained to Ross as they sat down to beefsteak and baked potatoes, "than to be with the men. It’s pleasanter for me–and," with a jolly laugh, "for them also, I expect."
Ross liked this frank young superintendent who had so kindly taken him in. He felt that he must get his bearings in some way, and Steele was the man to set him right.
Therefore quite early in the evening the boy burst out with:
"Mr. Steele, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m the greenest tenderfoot that ever came to Wyoming. Now, you know the ropes here, and I don’t. Will you advise me?"