“Yes.”
“Then I’ll tell you what I want to do: I want you to shift the crew so that there is a day and a night shift. The rebuilding of the dam can be 243 put off for a while, except for such work as the millmen are agreeable to take on. I want to sink! I don’t want to waste any time about it. I want to go down just as fast as it can be done, and when we get to the seven-hundred-foot, one gang must start to drift for the green lead, and the others must keep going down.”
He was almost knocked over the desk by a rousing, enthusiastic slap on the back.
“Now you’re my old pardner again!” Bill shouted. “You’re the lad again that was fresh from the schools, knew what he wanted, and went after it. Dick, I’ve been kind of worried about you since we came here,” the veteran went on, in a softer tone of voice. “You ain’t been like the old Dick. You ain’t had the zip! It’s as if you were afraid all the time of losing Sloan’s money, and it worried you. And sometimes––now, I don’t want you to get sore and cuss me––it seemed to me as if your mind wa’n’t altogether on the job! As if the Cross didn’t mean everything.”
He waited expectantly for a moment, as if inviting a confidence; then, observing that the younger man was flushed, and not looking at him, grinned knowingly, and trudged out of the office, calling back as he went: “There’ll be sump water in the creek in half an hour.”
As if imbued with new energy, he ordered one of the idle millmen to act as stoker, if he cared to do so, which was cheerfully done, had the extra pump attached, saw the fire roaring from another boiler, and by noon the shaft rang with the steady throb of the pistons pounding and pulling the waste water upward. The last of the unwatering of the Cross was going forward in haste. By six o’clock in the evening he reported that soundings showed that the map had not been checked up, and that the shaft was seven hundred and ten feet deep, and that they would commence a drift on the seven-hundred-foot mark the next day.
Dick was awakened at an early hour, and found Bill missing. He went over to the hoist house, where a sleepy night man, new to the hours, grinned at him with a pleasant: “Looks like we’re busy, just––the––same, Mr. Townsend! The old man”––the superintendent of a mine is always “the old man,” be he but twenty––“left orders last night that when the water was clear at seven hundred feet he was to be called. He kicked up two of the drill men at four this mornin’, and they’re down there puttin’ the steel into the rock ever since. Hear ’em? He’s makin’ things hump!”
Dick leaned over the unused compartment of 245 the shaft, and heard the steady, savage chugging of the drills. Bill was “makin’ things hump!” with a vengeance.
A man who had been sent to the camp for the semi-weekly mail arrived while the partners were at breakfast, and the first letter laid before them was one with a New York postmark, which Dick read anxiously. It was from Sloan, who told him that he had been unexpectedly called to the Pacific coast on a hurried trip, and that, while he did not have time to visit the Croix d’Or, he very earnestly hoped that Dick would arrange, on receipt of the letter, to meet him in Seattle, and named a date.