As he watched the unerring way in which McKay’s clumsily shaped finger followed the designs, stopping at each questionable point and rubbing back and forth over it with the determined questioning of a hand competent to remedy defects, Loring thanked heaven for the fact that the Quentin Company, their rush of early work over, had parted with such a man. The very twitching of the corners of McKay’s mustache, as he pored over the papers, showed a personality teeming with success and energy. After an hour of hard work Stephen pushed back his chair from the desk and rolled up the prints. “I’m afraid, Mac,” he said, “that you are going to be very busy here. You see I know how good a man you are. But I also realize that after your journey you must eat, and that you will want to see your quarters.” He called Reade into the room and introduced him. “Take Mr. McKay and show him where he is to live. Put him in that new shack on the right-hand side of the road.” With a sudden recollection of McKay’s treatment of him on that first night at Quentin, Stephen went on with a broad grin: “To-night I will send you over some blankets. You can pay for them out of your first month’s pay, and to-morrow I will let you have an old straw hat of mine.” McKay smiled sheepishly, as he stood twirling his rusty black felt hat in his fingers. Accustomed as he was to the sudden changes which Arizona brings about in men’s fortunes, Loring’s meteoric rise was too great a problem for him to solve. He could not adjust himself to the miraculous change which had been wrought in the life of the man before him. He could only stand speechless and gaze at the marvel, and then drop his eyes again to the baggy knees of his best trousers. Stephen took pity on him in his bewilderment and interrupted his reflections: “If you can start in to work after lunch, I will have Mr. Fitz, the man who is leaving, show you what little he has done. You had better take a microscope to see it with.” McKay followed Reade out of the office, his efficient, right-angled and non-complex mind in a whirl. “_Steve Loring_, manager of the Kay mine! I certainly will be damned. _Him_ running all this!” He gazed stupefied at the ordered confusion of the busy camp before him. “_Steve Loring!_ Phew!” And all the time the man of whom McKay was thinking with admiring envy sat before his desk, his head sunk upon his folded arms in an attitude of profound dejection. To McKay, Loring seemed to have reached the highest level of the up grade in being the manager of a successful mine. What more could any man wish? But to Loring all that he had achieved was as nothing.