Betner fell foul of me shortly after he arrived, and did his best to make things so unpleasant for me that I should quit; and this he kept up till the day he left, though he did not seem to have nerve enough to fire me. And I walked the chalk line as closely as I could, and tried to give him no opportunity. I found out later that the reason he was after my scalp was because he had got wind of the fact that I had been sent down by Bole of New York, who was at that time president of the company, and he thought I was there as a spy on the rest of them. But in any case it came natural to him to rawhide all the men, as he had been accustomed to do in the east, where men will either stand it or quit. Besides, he had been mostly handling submissive foreign emigrants, and now had a different class to deal with, and did not realise it. The Southern boys will not stand it except from some one they look up to and respect or fear. There used to be a man named Kipp Kinney at the mines, who really was a genuine gunfighter. He had killed a man in Uvalde some years before, and had lived in the hills till the affair blew over. He had been with the sheriff, Pat Garrett (the most noted sheriff in the South at that time), when they had to kill the notorious Billy the Kid, who had killed nineteen men by the time he was nineteen years old. One has seen pictures of the typical Texas cow-boy, tall, ungainly, all bones apparently, with heavy eyebrows and a long drooping moustache. Well, add to this pale grey eyes, deeply set, dark reddish-brown skin, with little hair-like veins close to the surface, and a pronounced Roman nose, and you have Kipp. Kipp told me one day he was going to quit, and on my asking him why, said, "Well, you know that man Betner and I cannot just naturally get along. I guess he cannot help being as he is, but if I stay I shure’ll have to kill him, and I am getting too old to have any more trouble." Betner was quite unaware of the risks he was taking with men of this stamp, for I proved later he had very little courage to back his bluffs. He never learned much Spanish, but he had the Mexicans scared to death of him, and they jumped when he spoke, whether they understood clearly what he wanted done or not. One day Betner was raising a three-foot steel stack, forty feet long, up to its base on top of a boiler. He had it swung up on a block and tackle from a gin-pole, with three or four Mexicans on each guy-wire holding it perpendicular. He had it almost ready to place and lower away, when he found he needed one more man to assist him at the foot of the stack. Without turning round to indicate any particular man, he called out, in broken Spanish, “One man come here quick.” Mexicans of this class are natural born fools, and each poor frightened man thought that he must mean him individually, so let go his guy-wire and ran to Betner. It is a wonder no one was squashed, as down came the stack and flattened out.