She wanted to go to him. But what would he say? How forward, how unwomanly it would seem! Did he ever think of her? Ah! sometimes she thought so! But he was beyond her now; she could not go to him. But Dan would expect it. Poor Dan! He needed somebody to say a kind word. So she had gone. She had bathed his aching head; she had told him she was praying for him; she had left with him the blossoms picked at her door. Dan or Job--which should it be? In the doorway she stood dreaming till the sun was between the tree-tops, and looked straight down the trail. All day at her tasks she dreamed on. Twice she took her bonnet and thought she would go to Job; then she hung it away again. There they stood at the doorway of her soul--Dan, crippled, helpless, selfish; a poor, wild, wandering boy. Job, strong, brave, the soul of honor, the manliest of men, a Christian in all that word means in a young man's life--her ideal. There they stood on the threshold of her heart; and, lingering at sundown in the same old doorway, the tears filling her eyes, she took them both in--Dan to pity, comfort, cheer; Job to honor and to love. Job was hers; perhaps he would never know it, but that day she gave him the best a woman has--her first love. [Illustration: (decoration)] CHAPTER XX. ACROSS THE MONTHS. The next two years came and went in Grizzly county without any events to be chronicled in the city press--no strikes or rich finds or stirring deeds; yet they were years that counted much in some lives. Job went back to the mines, no longer behind the pay window, but as assistant superintendent. Never had so young a man had so responsible a place at the Yellow Jacket. The negotiations and intercourse with the outside world, and the complicated plans of a great company, were not his task. He was the soul of the mine. His it was to deal with the "hands," and stand between them and that intangible, soulless thing men call a corporation. He was the prophet of the company and priest pleading the needs of five hundred men at the doors of the directors. There was nothing in the laws of the company defining his position, and he could hardly have defined it himself. He only knew that he was there to make life a little brighter, home a little more sacred, the friction of business a little less, the higher part of manhood more valuable, to five hundred hard-working men of all creeds and races that lived on the bare mountain-side about the Yellow Jacket mine.