It took me some days to get things working smoothly again, and in the meantime the pit-foreman sobered up. One rainy night I had occasion to go over to the Mexican quarters to see one of the men I needed for the morrow. On my way over I saw a flash of light in the second storey of the extractor house, which went out so quickly that I thought I must have been mistaken. Still, I went over and climbed the staircase quietly, as I could hear a low murmur of voices, and wanted to catch them unawares if there was any “monkey work” going on. When I got inside, without their hearing me, I struck a match and found about twenty Mexicans, men, women, and children, camped up there, and, what was worse, smoking cigarettes. It had been the flash of a match I saw. There was a wild scramble, but I rounded them all up, and then they told me in the most artless way that the roofs of their houses leaked and so they had moved up there; utterly ignoring the fact that they were smoking in a building in which were stored 16,000 gallons of naphtha, and about 50 tons of excelsior (a sort of wood shavings) with which they had made themselves beds. This is the sort of recklessness with which one has to cope when employing Mexicans. To show how inflammable and explosive this “63” naphtha is, I will mention what I saw once. We had been emptying all the extractors of rock out of which the naphtha had not been properly distilled. We had taken out about seventy-five tons and run it out on the dump pile in cars. While unloading a car one of the men, who had a pair of O.K. shoes (miner’s shoes with the soles studded with nails), jumped down the pile to get a hoe that he had dropped. There was a puff and the whole pile was on fire; he had struck a spark with his shoe. He looked for a minute like an understudy for the devil in “Faust,” then beating the world’s record for high and long jumps he was out with nothing worse than a singed whisker and a wholesome respect for naphtha.