"Do for me? When he got fresh air in him again, up in the hoist, he sat up and opened his hand. In it was a candlestick and a snipe, burned on the side till the wick looked about a foot long. 'Who owns this candlestick?' says he. No one spoke, but some of us knowed it belonged to old Deacon Wells, an absent-minded old cuss, but the deacon had a family of nigh on to ten kids. So nobody answered. 'Some fool left this here,' Bully bellowed, tearing around. 'And that's what started the fire. I'll kick the man off the works that owns the stick.' Still nobody said anything. He caught me grinnin'. 'You know who it was,' says he. 'Sure I do,' says I, 'but I'm a little tongue-tied.' Then he told me he'd fire me if I didn't say who it was. 'Give me my time-check,' says I, and he gave it. He found out afterward I was the man that dragged him out, and sent a letter up to Colusa askin' me to come back, but I didn't go. Don't s'pose he'd remember me now, and don't know as I'd want him to. Any man that works for Bully comes about as near givin' away his heart's blood as any one could, and live." The voices went rumbling on, and Dick sat thinking of the strange, powerful man of the Rattler. "Three of the millmen know their business," mumbled Bill, as if all the time he had been mentally appraising his force. "Two are rumdums. The chips isn't bad. He could carpenter anywhere, and if he's as smart a timberman as he is millwright, will make good. The engineer that's to relieve Bells ain't so much, but I'll leave it to Bells to cuss him into line. That goes. Two of the Burley men are all right, and I fired the third in the first hour because he didn't know what was the nut and which the wrench. Smuts is a gem. He put the pigeon-blue temper on a bunch of drills as fast as any man could have done it." Dick did not answer, but concentrated his mind on the work ahead. The whistle blew, and he compelled Bill to submit to new bandages, following the doctor's instructions, and smiled at his steady swearing as the wrappings were removed and the blisters redressed. They walked across to the hoist, entered the cage, and felt the sinking sensation as they were dropped, rather than lowered, to the six-hundred-foot level. The celerity of the descent almost robbed him of breath, but he thought of sturdy old Bells' boast, that he had "never run a cage into the sheaves, nor dropped it to the sump, in forty years of steam."