THE YELLOW JACKET MINE.
The next fall Mr. Malden got Job the place of assistant cashier at the
Yellow Jacket Mine. His staunch character, his local fame as a student
at the Frost Creek school, and his general manly bearing, added to Mr.
Malden's influence in the county, won him the place when the former
assistant left for the East. Andrew Malden thought it would be a good
experience for a young man like Job, and perhaps would open the way to
something better than a lumber mill and a timber and stock ranch.
The Yellow Jacket Mine was one of the oldest and most famous in the
whole country. It was the very day they sighted the ship off Telegraph
Hill that brought the news into 'Frisco Bay that California was
admitted as a State, that gold was discovered in Yellow Jacket Creek,
where, when the rush came some days later, the men said they didn't
know which was most plenty--yellow jackets in the air, or yellow
jackets in the gravel bed of the creek as it lay dry and bare in the
summer sun.
At last the creek bed had been washed over and over till the
red-shirted miners could find not one nugget more, and the Yellow
Jacket was deserted. Then one day a poor stranded fellow, who came in
too late to make enough to get out, was digging a well, and found
quartz down deep and a streak of gold in it. That was the beginning of
the real fame of the Yellow Jacket. A company bought it up, machinery
was put in, and now, in Job Malden's day, the stamp mills and deep
tunnels of the mine kept five hundred men busy in shifts that never
ceased night or day.
Job never forgot the first day he went there as assistant cashier. He
had seen it all before, but when one is a sort of "partner" in a firm,
it looks different to one. And so it did to Job, as, after a long ride
with Tony in the buckboard down the Frost Creek road, up past Mike
Hennessy's, down and up and across Rattlesnake Gulch, and over the
heavily timbered mountain, a bend in the road brought him in full view
of the Yellow Jacket on the bare hillside opposite. The tall
smoke-stacks belching forth their black clouds; the big buildings
about them; the great heap of waste stuff at the right; the dump-cars
running out and back; the miners' shanties bare and brown on the left,
running up the hillside, hugging the break-neck steeps; the handsome
house on the south which he knew must be the superintendent's home;
the tall, ungainly brick structure of the company's store in the heart
of things; the far-off thump, thump, and the ceaseless roar of the
machinery--all this made a deep impression on Job.
For a year, at least, he was to live amid this scene. What a strange
life it was for Job there at the Yellow Jacket! There, in sight of the
eternal hills; there, only five miles, in an air-line, from the quiet
ranch, from Bess, the great barns, the world of nature, and home--and
yet it seemed five thousand miles away to him. Shut in that little
office behind the iron bars, bending over the great books sometimes
far into the night, looking out each pay-day through a little arched
window on grimy faces and rough-bearded men who held out toil-worn
hands to receive the week's earnings which long before another week
would find their way into some saloon-keeper's till or gambler's
pocket.
The only out-door world he saw was between the rear door of the office
and the long, low boarding-house where the foremen and clerks lived.
One corner of the great room upstairs, where a hard bed ran up against
the roof, and one place at the long, oilcloth-covered table, he had
the privilege to call his own for the modest sum of a gold piece a
week. He had every other Sunday to himself by the extreme favor of the
"boss," on whose own calendar Sunday never came, and who could not see
why it should on any one's else.
At first, Job left the narrow, well-worn streets, always, it seemed to
him, crowded with an endless procession of dirty, pale-faced,
muscular, rough men going to and from shifts; left them far behind and
tramped over to the Frost Creek school, redolent with peculiar
memories, to the afternoon service. But when the snows came and winter
set in, he dared not take the long tramps, but hugged the fire at his
boarding-house, read his little Testament, and tried in vain to find
one spot out of hearing of the noise of tramping feet, the roar of the
stamp-mill, and the hoarse laughter and rude stories and language of
the men ever coming and going.
He could never get away from the sound, and only in an old, abandoned
shaft back of the office could he crawl down out of sight to pray. But
Job never forgot to pray in those days. He was learning, as never
before, what it is to be in the world and yet not of it; in its
turmoil and din, sharing its work, mingling with its strange
humanity, and yet living in the atmosphere of prayer and high
thinking; in a world of impurity, yet living a pure life; a world of
evil words, and yet never even thinking them; in the world, and yet
not of it.
Job Malden was fast growing into manhood. It was in those long winter
days at the Yellow Jacket that the heart came back to him and somehow
he found himself thinking of Jane Reed. The bitter memory of the folly
of those days last winter at the Frost Creek school still haunted him,
and yet the hardness had gone out of his soul. He had no right to
think of Jane, he felt; he had forfeited all claim to her affection.
But somehow the old love came back, and he longed to go to her and be
forgiven. What a true girl she was!--a child of the mountains. Little
she knew of the city and its guile, of society and its masks. How
could he ever have thought her common or beneath him! She towered up
in his thought like the pines of her native mountains, as fresh and
natural and wild as they. He would not have her different. She was far
above him. Faith, and church, and simple homely virtues, and all that
is holy, were linked in Job's mind with the memory of artless, honest,
great-hearted Jane that came back to him in the lonely hours at the
mine.
One day he started back at seeing a strangely familiar face present
itself at the pay window.
"Oh, yer needn't be scart,' Job, because yer old pard's got a job in
the Yellow Jacket as well as yer." It was Dan's voice. "Must be mighty
nice in there handin' out the boodle to us poor, hard-worked laborers;
mighty easy to tuck a little of it in yer pocket now and then."
Job colored, and replied that it was not his money, and he only took
his pay like the men.
"Mighty good yet, ain't yer, Job; playin' the pious dodge still.
Thought perhaps the way that schoolma'am jilted yer would take the
big-head out of yer. Well, I don't make any pretense of bein' pious;
don't need to, as I can see--get all I want without it. Every gal in
town wants me, and a fine one that came near gettin' fooled on yer
likes me purty well. In fact, that's what's brought me over to the
mine--got to get a little stuff to fix up the house for her. When a
fellow brings a wife home, he wants the old place lookin' slick.
Good-day, Job. See yer again."
Job made no reply, but a lump came into his throat. He stood and
stared, and then turned in an absent-minded way and bent his head over
the great ledger, though he seemed not to care which page opened. Jane
to marry Dan! Was that what he had meant? Had it come to that? Once
Job had not cared, but now the thought made him wild. Could it be
true? Jane to marry Dan Dean! Better she were dead. Job felt he could
see her carried to the grave with less sorrow than to see her Dan's
wife.
* * * * *
It was very strange how Job came to be the preacher at the Yellow
Jacket mine. Not that he ever put on clerical garb or deserted the
office or was anything more than a plain, every-day Christian. Yet
there came a time when in the eyes of those rough miners, with hearts
far more tender than one would think from their exterior--and not only
in their eyes, but in those of the few wives and the half-clad
children who played on the waste heap--Job came to be called "The
Reverend," and looked up to as a spiritual leader.
It was the day that he went down to the eight-hundred-foot level that
it began. He well remembered it. Up to the left of the stamp-mill, not
far from the main office, was a square, red-painted building, up whose
steps, just as the bell in the brick store's tower struck the set
time, a procession of clean-faced miners went in and a procession of
grimy ones came out. It was at the one o'clock shift that Job went in
that day, watched the men hang their coats on what seemed to him an
endless line of pegs, take their stand one by one on the little
platform which stood in the center of the floor like a trap-door,
grasp the iron-bar above them, and at the tinkling of a bell vanish
suddenly down into darkness out of sight.
It was the first time Job had been down the mine. The sight of the
constantly-disappearing figures on the cage that came and went did not
encourage him to go, but soon it was his turn. One of the men he knew
grasped one side of the bar of the trapeze over him, one the other,
the bell tinkled, and down he dropped with a jump that almost took his
breath; down past long, subterranean tunnels of arched rock, which,
from the heat he felt from them, and the blinding glare of the lights,
seemed to him like the furnaces of Vulcan. Further still he dropped to
the eight-hundred-foot level, where he stepped off in a narrow cavern
dimly lighted and stretching away into the distant darkness. Oh, how
hot it was! The brawny, white-chested miners had thrown off all
clothing but their trousers, and were dividing their time between
mighty blows on the great solid rocks, and the air-shaft and tub of
water, where every few minutes they had to go and bathe lungs and
face. The sound of the picks, the rattle of the ore cars bringing the
stuff to be hauled up the shaft, the steady thump, thump, of the pumps
removing the water from the lower levels, the intermittent drop and
rise of the cage, filled the weird place with strange sounds.
Job had delivered his message to the "boss" of the tunnel and was
hurrying back to the cage, when a half-naked miner, all stained with
the ever-dripping ooze from above, stopped him and said:
"Be ye the faither that prayed Yankee Sam t'rough?"
"Why--yes, and no," answered Job. "I was with Yankee Sam when he died,
but I'm no priest or parson."
"Aye, I said to Pat it was ye as ye went down, priest or not. I've
heard of ye, and the mon that could shrive Yankee Sam is a good enough
priest for any mon. Now, me boy Tim is dying, the only son of his
mother, and she in her grave. And Tim and me, we live alone in the hut
back of Finnigan's saloon. Tim's a frail lad. He would work in the
mines, and the hot air in this place and the cold air whin he wint up
gave him the lung faver, and the doctor says he's got to go. The next
shift I'm going up to him. Meet me at the pump-house. Don't tell him
yez is not a priest; it's all the same to him, and he'll die aisier if
he thinks the faither's come. Poor Tim, me only boy!"
What could Job do but consent? What could he do late that afternoon
but meet the broken-hearted Irish father at the pump-house and climb
the steep street to Finnigan's, and go in back to the poor hut that
the miner called home?
On a low, matted bed of straw and a torn blanket or two, in a corner
of the dismal shanty, through which the cold winds swept, lay Tim,
dying. The hectic flush was on his thin cheek, the glaze of death
seemed in his eye. He reached his wan hand to Job. A lad of sixteen he
was, but no more years of life were there for him.
"Tim, the faither's come. Tim, me boy, confess now and get ready for
hiven."
The boy glanced up. Perhaps Job did look like a priest, with his
smooth face and manly countenance. He hardly knew what to say or do
except to take that weak hand in his and press it with a brother's
warm clasp of sympathy. The dying boy touched his inmost heart.
"Faither," the boy faltered, "I am so sick! I have been a bad boy
sometimes. I--I--" Then he stopped to cough, and continued, "I haven't
been to mass in a year--no chance here, faither--and I got drunk last
Fourth--may the Holy Mother forgive me!--and I have been so bad
sometimes. But--" and he faltered, "I had a good mother, and she had
me christened right early."
"Aye, she was!" sobbed Tim's father.
"And," Tim went on, "and I'm so sorry for the bad! When you say the
prayers, tell her I'm sorry; for, somehow I think the blessed
Jesus"--and here the boy crossed himself--"the blessed Jesus will hear
my mother's prayer for Tim as soon as he'd hear his own. Faither, is
it wrong to think so?"
And Job, thinking of his own mother, with tears in his eyes could only
say, "No, Tim, no."
The lad grew still; and kneeling, Job talked low of God's great love,
as he had talked to Yankee Sam, prayed as best he could, and felt as
if he had indeed committed this mother's boy into the keeping of his
God, as Tim lay still and dead before him.