the Beau Brummel secretary of the company fell down once with dizziness
and went to bed after the weekly inspection.

When the first day was done I carried the ten sacks of samples--via
Bruno's shoulders--through the labyrinth of corridors and shafts to be
loaded on a car and pushed to the main shaft, where blew a veritable
sea-breeze that gave those coming from the red-hot pockets a splendid
chance for catching cold which few overlooked. In the _bodega_, or
underground office, I changed my dripping garments for dry ones, but
waited long for the broken-down motor to lift me again finally to pure
air. In the days that followed I was advanced to the rank of car-boss in
this same level, and found enough to do and more in keeping the tricky
car-men moving. A favorite ruse was to tip over a car on its way to the
chute and to grunt and groan over it for a half-hour pretending to lift
it back on the rails; or to tuck away far back in some abandoned "lead"
the cars we needed, until I went on tours of investigation and ferreted
them out.

During the last days of October I drew my car-boss wages and set out to
follow the ore after it left the mine. From the underground chutes it
was drawn up to the surface in the iron buckets, dumped on "gridleys"
(screens made of railroad rails separated a like width) after weighing,
broken up and the worthless rock thrown out on the "dump," a great
artificial hill overhanging the valley below and threatening to bury the
little native houses huddled down in it. A toy Baldwin locomotive
dragged the ore trains around the hill to the noisy stamp-mill spreading
through another valley, with a village of adobe huts overgrown with
masses of purple flowers and at the bottom a plain of white sand waste
from which the "values" had been extracted. The last samples I had taken
assayed nine pounds of silver and 23 grams of gold to the ton. The