At four o’clock there are longer pauses in our labors. There is more leaning on shovels and more frequent glances at our timepiece, the sun, as he sinks in the western heavens. The shadow of the hill opposite creeps slowly down its side. It is a cool, welcome shadow. The strongest worker secretly welcomes it. Though he be a “horse of a man,” his muscles also feel the effects of the long day’s labor. It is more his strong will than his body which keeps him swinging the pick. We are in duty bound to work till six o’clock. Everybody works till six o’clock. Everybody is more or less tired at four o’clock, but it is not the capacity of the body for labor that fixes the time. It is custom, stupid custom. The gauge is the limit of physical strength, not for the weakest, but the strongest. The great, brawny-armed, big-boned Hercules of our company doesn’t feel it much. He may walk three miles after supper to the Bar store, play cards and drink whiskey till nine o’clock and then walk back again and be up fresh for work next morning by 5:30 o’clock. This is 1860. In 1870 he showed it, however, and in the marks of age was ten years ahead of his time. You can’t keep up this sort of thing--digging, tugging, lifting, wet to the skin day after day, summer and winter, with no interval of rest, but a steady drag twelve months of the year--without paying for it. There’s dissipation in the use of muscle as well as in the use of whiskey. Every old miner knows it now and feels it. Don’t you? How does the muscle of forty-five years in 1882 compare with that of twenty-five in 1862? Of course, man must live by the sweat of his brow, or the sweat of his brain, but many of you sweat too long in those days, and I hear you all saying, “That’s so!” Start anew the fire in the little stove; thump the wet boots in the corner; drag yourself down to the spring a few hundred yards distant for a pail of fresh water; hack a few more chips from the dried stump; mix some flour, water, and yeast powder for the day’s baking; set down a minute on your flour-barrel chair and look on your earthly possessions. The worn and scarred trunk you brought years ago from the States; it holds your best suit of a forgotten fashion, two or three white shirts, a bundle of letters from home, a few photographs, a Bible, not worn out with use, a quartz crystal, a few gold “specimens,” a tarantula’s nest, the tail of a rattlesnake and six vests. Do you remember how vests would accumulate in the mines? Pants, coat, everything else would wear out--vests never. CHAPTER XIV. THE MINER’S RAINY DAY.