The men had finished their hasty meal, in hasty miner's fashion, silently, and tramped, with clumping feet, out of the mess-house to the shade of its northern side before Bill had ended his painful repast. Whiffs of tobacco smoke and voices came through the open windows, where the miners lounged and rested on a long bench while waiting for the whistle. "Don't you fool yourself about Bully Presby," one of them was saying. "It's true he's a hard man, and out for the dust every minute of his life, but he's got nerve, all right. He'll bulldoze and fight and growl and gouge, but he's there in other ways. I don't like him, and we quit pretty sudden, yet I saw him do somethin' once that beat me." "Did you work on the Rattler?" another voice queried. "No," the other went on, "I worked for him down on the Placer Belle in California. It was under the old system and was a small mine. Kept all the dynamite on the hundred-foot level in an old chamber. Every man went there to get it when it was time to load his holes. I was startin' for mine one evenin', whistlin' along, when I smelled smoke. Stopped and sniffed, and about weakened. Knowed it was comin' from the powder room down there. It wan't more'n twenty feet from the shaft, and there was two or three tons of it in that hole. Ran back and gave the alarm bell to the engineer, then ducked my head and went toward the smoke to see if anything could be done before she blew up the whole works. On his hands and knees, with all that was left of his coat, was Bully. He'd got the fire nearly smothered out, and we coughed and spit, and drowned the rest of the sparks from the water barrel. He'd fought it to a finish all alone, and I had to drag him out to the cage that was slidin' up and down as if the engineer was on a drunk, and every time it went up I could see the boys' faces, kind of white, and worried, and hear the alarms bangin' away like mad. But he'd put the fire out there with all that stuff around him. That took some nerve, I tell you!" "What did he do for you?" asked another voice. The narrator gave a heavy laugh, and chuckled.