dominating position; over each and all who came within range of her
influence Felice, with her black hair and green eyes, her slim figure
and her certain indefinite "cheek"--which must not by any manner of
means be considered as "boldness"--cast the weird of her kind.

If one understood her kind, knew how to make allowances, knew just how
seriously to take her eyes and her "cheek," no great harm was done.
Otherwise, consequences were very apt to follow.

Hicks was one of those who from the very first had understood. Hicks was
the manager of the mine, and Lockwood's chief--in a word, _the boss_. He
was younger even than Lockwood, a boy virtually, but a wonderful boy--a
boy such as only America, western America at that, could produce,
masterful, self-controlled, incredibly capable, as taciturn as a sphinx,
strong of mind and of muscle, and possessed of a cold gray eye that was
as penetrating as chilled steel.

To this person, impersonal as force itself, Felice had once, by some
mysterious feminine art, addressed, in all innocence, her little
maneuver of fascination. One lift of the steady eyelid, one quiet glint
of that terrible cold gray eye, that poniarded her every tissue of
complexity, inconsistency, and coquetry, had been enough. Felice had
fled the field from this young fellow, so much her junior, and then
afterward, in a tremor of discomfiture and distress, had kept her
distance.

Hicks understood Felice. Also the great majority of the
miners--shift-bosses, chuck-tenders, bed-rock cleaners, and the
like--understood. Lockwood did not.