There were five of these extractors and two pumps to look after, and it kept me on the move. The second or third day one of the pumps went on strike, and I had to take it down and get it working again. When I got through I went my rounds, and found to my horror that I also had let the water get too low in one of the settlers. Here was an opportunity to get rid of me, and I very soon got my “time.” Then Providence took a hand in my behalf, for my predecessor had left the camp and the day man got sick. The night man took one of his shifts, and then tried to take his own, but gave out; and so at 12 P.M. the foreman came and woke me up to go back again. We had the naphtha stored in overhead tanks, and the orders were most strict against smoking or carrying matches near the works; yet one day we caught one of the extractor loaders sitting on top of the overhead naphtha tanks smoking a cigarette, endangering not only his own life but that of every man on the place. It seems natural to Mexicans to disobey orders if they think there is the bare chance of their not getting caught; and the more danger there is the more they seem to like it. There used to be a standing order that no one was to ride on the ore cars that ran on the incline down into the pit. One day while I was still working on the crusher I saw a rather amusing thing occur through a man disobeying this order. One of the Padillas, brother of the hoister man, was riding the car down to the pit, when his brother, thinking to have some fun with him, slipped the clutch, and let the car go at a tremendous pace. When, however, it neared the switch at the bottom of the incline, where the cars branched off to the different parts of the pit, the hoister man got scared and lost his head; instead of gently slipping the clutch in, he jammed it down hard and stopped the car dead, standing his brother on his head in the car. Talking of car accidents, another happened a couple of years later, when we had enlarged the plant and built a new extractor house up on the hill. To get the crushed rock up to this house we built a double track incline 900 feet long, with a rise of about 70 feet. The ore bin was set up over these tracks, and behind the bin was a platform on struts, on which was placed a double drum hoisting engine. One day I had just come out of the pit when I heard some one shout, and, looking up, I saw that the cable had parted and the car with two tons of rock in it had started down the incline from near the top. I shouted to the hoisting man to get down out of the way, but he seemed fascinated by that car, and stood there with his mouth open watching it come. By the time it reached the bottom it was going like an express train, and the way it took the struts out from under the engineer’s platform was a sight to see. Down came the engineer, but he was up and dusting himself by the time I reached him; and all he said was, “H—l! she was sure travelling!”