“You're an educated man; you're no labourer, that I know. Who's paying you?”
“There you are! You don't believe in altruism.”
The other blew a ring of smoke across the room. “Just want to put the company in the hole, hey? Some kind of agitator?”
“I am a miner who wants to be a check-weighman.”
“Socialist?”
“That depends upon developments here.”
“Well,” said the marshal, “you're an intelligent chap, that I can see. So I'll lay my hand on the table and you can study it. You're not going to serve as check-weighman in North Valley, nor any other place that the 'G. F. C.' has anything to do with. Nor are you going to have the satisfaction of putting the company in a hole. We're not even going to beat you up and make a martyr of you. I was tempted to do that the other night, but I changed my mind.”
“You might change the bruises on my arm,” suggested Hal, in a pleasant voice.
“We're going to offer you the choice of two things,” continued the marshal, without heeding this mild sarcasm. “Either you will sign a paper admitting that you took the twenty-five dollars from Alec Stone, in which case we will fire you and call it square; or else we will prove that you took it, in which case we will send you to the pen for five or ten years. Do you get that?”
Now when Hal had applied for the job of check-weighman, he had been expecting to be thrown out of the camp, and had intended to go, counting his education complete. But here, as he sat and gazed into the marshal's menacing eyes, he decided suddenly that he did not want to leave North Valley. He wanted to stay and take the measure of this gigantic “burglar,” the General Fuel Company.