Upon the pommel of his saddle lay a long single-barreled squirrel gun, for the hills were full of squirrels, and Jud was fond of a tender one, now and then. Behind him, as usual, trotted Bonaparte, his sullen eyes looking for an opportunity to jump on any timid country dog which happened along. There are two things for which all mills must be prepared--the wear and tear of Time on the machinery--the wear and tear of Death on the frail things who yearly work out their lives before it. In the fight for life between the machine and the human labor, in the race of life for that which men call success, who cares for the life of one little mill hand? And what is one tot of them from another? And if one die one month and another the next, and another the next and the next, year in and year out, who remembers it save some poverty-hardened, stooped and benumbed creature, surrounded by a scrawny brood calling ever for bread? The world knows not--cares not--for its tiny life is but a thread in the warp of the great Drawing-in Machine. So fearful is the strain upon the nerve and brain and body of the little things, that every year many of them pass away--slowly, surely, quietly--so imperceptibly that the mill people themselves scarcely miss them. And what does it matter? Are there not hundreds of others, born of ignorance and poverty and pain, to take their places? And the dead ones--unknown, they simply pass into a Greater Unknown. Their places are filled with fresh victims--innocents, whom Passion begets with a caress and Cupidity buys with a curse. Children they are--tots--and why should they know that they are trading--life for death? It was a bright fall morning, and Jud Carpenter rode toward the mountain a few miles away. They are scarcely mountains--these beautifully wooded hills in the Tennessee Valley, hooded by blue in the day and shrouded in somber at night; but it pleases the people who live within the sweet influence of their shadows to call them mountains. Jud knew where he was going, and he rode leisurely along, revolving in his mind the plan of his campaign. He needed the recruits for the Acme Mills, and in all his past experience as an employment agent he had never undertaken to bring in a family where as much tact and diplomacy was required as in this case. It was a dilapidated gate at which he drew rein. There had once been handsome pillars of stone and brick, but these had fallen and the gate had been swung on a convenient locust tree that had sprung up and grown with its usual rapidity from its sheltered nook near the crumbling rock wall. Only one end of the gate was hung; and it lay diagonally across the entrance of what had once been a thousand acres of the finest farm in the Tennessee Valley. Dismounting, Jud hitched his horse and set his gun beside the tree; and as it was easier to climb over the broken-down fence than to lift the gate around, he stepped over and then shuffled along in his lazy way toward the house.