Down on the dump, that fascinating mountain of soft, glittering waste rock, the godless twins went to dig on Christmas afternoon. The mining operations were elaborate that they projected there, particularly after Jack Cody's brother Peter joined them. While Peter was rigging up windlasses with pieced-out cord, Fom, with a couple of tin cups purloined from Wong's kitchen, brought up the rock, piling it in miniature dumps at the mouth of their shaft. Bep's awkward fingers could be trusted only with the preliminary scooping out of the ground where a new shaft was to be sunk. "Tell Fom," she said to the blue-sashed Smith twin in her pocket, "that I want the scooper; my hands are all sore." "Tell Bep," returned Fom, quickly, "that she can't have it till Pete an' I get through running our drift." The excuse did not seem legitimate to Bep, whose grimy hands ached to the fingertips from being used as both pick and shovel. She made a dart for the "scooper"--a heavy china cup which had been smashed in so fortunate a manner as to be ideally fitted for emptying ore by hand. But Fom was slim, and quick as a cat. She threw herself bodily upon both scooper and pick--the latter an old fork with but one tine left. Bep promptly threw herself on top of her twin, while Peter, a laconic lad, calmly set himself to rehabilitating the hind wheel of a battered tin toy express which served as a dump-cart. "Little folks shouldn't quarrel," suddenly said a slow voice above the struggling arms and legs of the twins. Fom looked up, still pressing her body hard against the tools in dispute, while Bep got to her feet, red-faced and panting. "We're not quarreling," said Florence, calmly. Superintendent Warren Pemberton, still in his oilskins from a trip down the mine, looked down at her and gasped. He did not know the Madigan brunette twin, and actually thought she was lying. But Fom was never known to lie; she only pettifogged. "You're not quarreling!" "Nope." "Didn't I see you with my own eyes?" he demanded, piqued. "People don't see people quarreling," said Fom, didactically. "They hear them." "Oh, that's it! Well, didn't I hear--" "No, you didn't; for we're mad and don't speak to each other." "But you're not quarreling?" "Nope," repeated Fom, stoutly, "we're not." Mr. Pemberton shook his head helplessly. "What are you doing?" "I'm running a drift"--Fom misunderstood the drift of his question--"from the Silver King to the Diamond Heart, and the earth keeps coming down. Then Bep tries to make it harder by grabbing for the tools and--" "Why don't you timber?" suggested Pemberton, gravely. "'Cause I don't have to," answered Fom, quite as seriously. "Oh, you don't!" Pemberton, a man with no sense of humor, had been unusually expansive; but he shrank angrily into himself now, as though from a cold douche. It took some time for one to get accustomed to Fom's way of instructing authorities upon the subjects which they were supposed to know most about.