I was glad, indeed, when, on the evening of the third day, Ribwood came to me and said:
"I guess you'd better work up at the shaft to-morrow. We want a man to wheel muck."
They had a shaft sunk on the hillside. They were down some forty feet and were drifting in, wheeling the pay-dirt down a series of planks placed on trestles to the dump. I gripped the handles of a wheelbarrow loaded to overspilling, and steered it down that long, unsteady gangway full of uneven joins and sudden angles. Time and again I ran off the track, but after the first day I became quite an expert at the business. My spirits rose. I was on the way of becoming a miner.
CHAPTER IX
Turning the windlass over the shaft was a little, tough mud-rat, who excited in me the liveliest sense of aversion. Pat Doogan was his name, but I will call him the "Worm."
The Worm was the foulest-mouthed specimen I have yet met. He had the lowest forehead I have ever seen in a white man, and such a sharp, ferrety little face. His reddish hair had the prison clip, and his little reddish eyes were alive with craft and cruelty. I noticed he always regarded me with a peculiarly evil grin, that wrinkled up his cheeks and revealed his hideously blackened teeth. From the first he gave me a creepy feeling, a disgust as if I were near some slimy reptile.
Yet the Worm tried to make up to me. He would tell me stories blended of the horrible and the grotesque. One in particular I remember.
"Youse wanta know how I lost me last job. I'll tell youse. You see, it was like dis. Dere was two Blackmoor guys dat got into de country dis Spring; came by St. Michaels; Hindoos dey was. One of dem 'Sicks' (an' dey looked sick, dey was so loose an' weary in der style) got a job from old man Gustafson down de shaft muckin' up and fillin' de buckets.
"Well, dere was dat Blackmoor down in de deep hole one day when I comes along, an' strikes old Gus for a job. So, seein' as de man on de windlass wanted to quit, he passed it up to me, an' I took right hold an' started in.