"Mighty good yet, ain't yer, Job; playin' the pious dodge still. Thought perhaps the way that schoolma'am jilted yer would take the big-head out of yer. Well, I don't make any pretense of bein' pious; don't need to, as I can see--get all I want without it. Every gal in town wants me, and a fine one that came near gettin' fooled on yer likes me purty well. In fact, that's what's brought me over to the mine--got to get a little stuff to fix up the house for her. When a fellow brings a wife home, he wants the old place lookin' slick. Good-day, Job. See yer again." Job made no reply, but a lump came into his throat. He stood and stared, and then turned in an absent-minded way and bent his head over the great ledger, though he seemed not to care which page opened. Jane to marry Dan! Was that what he had meant? Had it come to that? Once Job had not cared, but now the thought made him wild. Could it be true? Jane to marry Dan Dean! Better she were dead. Job felt he could see her carried to the grave with less sorrow than to see her Dan's wife. * * * * * It was very strange how Job came to be the preacher at the Yellow Jacket mine. Not that he ever put on clerical garb or deserted the office or was anything more than a plain, every-day Christian. Yet there came a time when in the eyes of those rough miners, with hearts far more tender than one would think from their exterior--and not only in their eyes, but in those of the few wives and the half-clad children who played on the waste heap--Job came to be called "The Reverend," and looked up to as a spiritual leader. It was the day that he went down to the eight-hundred-foot level that it began. He well remembered it. Up to the left of the stamp-mill, not far from the main office, was a square, red-painted building, up whose steps, just as the bell in the brick store's tower struck the set time, a procession of clean-faced miners went in and a procession of grimy ones came out. It was at the one o'clock shift that Job went in that day, watched the men hang their coats on what seemed to him an endless line of pegs, take their stand one by one on the little platform which stood in the center of the floor like a trap-door, grasp the iron-bar above them, and at the tinkling of a bell vanish suddenly down into darkness out of sight.