Across, on the other side of an endless chain-bucket elevator, was my shift-mate, who, owing to his having a 6o-ton capacity crusher, had a Mexican assistant. Both crushers dumped into the same elevator, which carried the crushed rock up into an elevated bin, from which it was distributed to the extractors, which I shall describe later. I worked all the morning, wondering what young Cursin could be doing with himself that he had not come round to visit me. But when I went to dinner, at noon, I found a note from him, saying he could stand it no longer, and he had gone off to catch the morning train. I got out a pair of dogskin gloves from my trunk at noon, as my hands were nearly raw from the rough rock, and, as they were good English leather, by the time they wore out my hands were tough enough to stand the strain. By night I ached in every muscle, and I had cramp in my hands and wrists from the jar of the crusher, because, owing to lack of knowledge and unskilfulness, I would, when jamming down a rock, get the bar between the rock and the moving jaw, and get all the jar of the machine stiff-armed. After a few days, however, I and my shift-mate got on friendly terms, and he would come over to show me how to do things right, so that the work became much easier. Each night I went to bed almost convinced that I could not stand more, and that I would have to quit in the morning. But in the morning I felt I could stand it one more day; and so it went on, all the time getting easier, till the idea of quitting went out of my mind entirely. There were thirty odd white men working at the mine, and about one hundred Mexicans, when I first went there, and it was certainly a tough camp. There was a barbed-wire fence dividing the Mexican camp, which was known as “Mexico,” from the rest of the buildings where the boarding-houses and the rest of the factory were. Over in Mexico they had a dance hall with a saloon attachment, and most of the men went over there when off duty. Fights were frequent and gun-plays occasional, but as a drunken man is seldom dangerous with a gun, no one got seriously hurt. The man (an American) who ran the dance hall was the son of the man in charge of the company’s freight wagons. He was called “Bud” Towser, and had the makings of a “bad-man” minus the “sand,” or pluck. Sober, he was very quiet and generally polite, but drunk, or even partly so, he was very quarrelsome, and the Mexicans were in deadly fear of him; and most of the white men gave him the road. One night two of the boys started a “rough-house” in his dance hall, thinking he had gone to town, but he had returned and was back in his room. When he burst out they made a bee-line for home, and as his gun barked after them in the dark they carried away most of the barbed-wire fence in their hurry.