Through this long fortnight of agony and waiting, Dick stayed in the settlement. From the time that he had bounded from the flat car with the relief party there had never been a moment that he had not been busy. The fact that he knew a little of everybody's language, enough to make himself understood at least; the fact that he understood their customs, had made many of the miners open their hearts to him in a way which otherwise would have been impossible. Dick had that wonderful thing, the ability to be at home with people of any sort or of any nation. He seemed at once to the miners to be one of them in a way that not even those in authority whom they had known longest could be. But it was not only to the people that he had made himself a helpful friend. In a hundred ways he had instinctively and unconsciously worked with Jack Mulligan, the stern young man who had bid him to jump on the flat car the morning that they had started from Sabinsport. Jack, he had found, was the son of the man who had opened the mines, a man known as "Jake," and, as Dick was to discover, a man notorious, but beloved. Mining had been in the blood of Jack Mulligan. If he had had his way he would have taken a pick at sixteen, and worked his way up. His mother, long dead, had extracted a promise from her devoted but riotous husband that Jack should have the best education the country would afford, if he would take it. And because it was his mother's wish, he had taken it; but he had turned it into the way of his own tastes. He had thrown himself heartily into the work of the great technological institute to which he had been sent. He had taken all of the special training as a mining engineer that the country afforded, and he had studied the best work of foreign mines. When he had come back at twenty-four to his own home, it was the understanding that he was to be employed as a general manager, not in any way to supplant the educated but tried men that had grown up under his father, but, as he planned it, to modernize the mine.