Cline—Bunk-houses—Work on a Rock-crusher—Mexican Dancing and Music.

Immediately on arrival I reported to the superintendent in charge of the mines at Cline. He told me to go to the men’s boarding-house and take any cot I found vacant, and also one for my friend.

The men’s boarding-house was a two-storey frame building, of which the upper part was divided into three dormitories, and the lower into dining-room and kitchen. It was built so shakily that any one walking upstairs shook the whole building, and was so roughly put together that the wind whistled through the walls everywhere. It was terribly hot in summer, having only a light shingle roof; and when a norther was blowing, the cold was intense in the winter.

Besides this bunk-house there was an office building, above which the office force slept, a house for the chief engineer, one for the foreman, and one for the superintendent. The latter was an old Confederate colonel, once a slave-owner, who could not get over the slave-time idea that a “gentleman” should not 89work, and really must not be bothered with “details.” I heard him say once, in answer to a query as to whether he had time to come and look at something: “Sir, I want you to understand that a gentleman always has time.” He really had so much time that about a month after I arrived the company decided to give him an indefinite holiday. They tell a story in the south about the old Confederate veterans. A farmer, who was showing a visitor over his farm, made the remark that all of his hands were old soldiers. Said the visitor, "You don’t tell me! Are any of them officers?" “Two of them,” said the farmer.

“That one there is a private, the man beyond is a major, and the man way yonder is a colonel.” “Are they all good men?” asked the visitor. "Well, I ain’t going to say anything against any man who fought for the South," said the farmer. "That private is a first-class man; but I’ve made up my mind to one thing—I ain’t going to hire any brigadier-generals."

The Cline foreman was what is known as “poor white trash” in the south, and his failing was drink, in which his wife often joined him. When on these sprees they used to quarrel, and sometimes he threw her out of the house, and sometimes she threw him. But as he did not bother the superintendent with 90“details,” the colonel overlooked these matters. Of course I found out all this later, but describe it here to give an idea of the class of men I worked under.

The mattresses and beds in the bunk-house were indescribable, and dust was everywhere, as the men were supposed to clean out their own rooms, and tired men of their stamp are not over-particular. I and Cursin spent a good part of the night fighting pests—winged and otherwise—but he was sleeping when I got up to get my breakfast before going to work at 6 A.M. the next morning. The food was good and plentiful, and the cook was good as camp cooks go.

I was ordered to go to one of the rock-crushers, of which there were two, and was handed a crowbar and sledge-hammer as the working tools of my trade. My work consisted of putting, unaided, forty-five tons of rock per day through the crusher. When the rock stuck, I had the bar to push it through with; and if the pieces were too big to go into the mouth of the crusher, I had the hammer to break them. The rock came up out of the pit in one-ton cars on an incline railway over my head, and were there dumped on to my platform, from which I had to pick them by hand and put them into the crusher mouth, which was about waist-high to me standing on the platform. 91This extra and unnecessary work was simply owing to the bad design, or rather absence of any design, when the plant was laid out.

Across, on the other side of an endless chain-bucket elevator, was my shift-mate, who, owing to his having a 6o-ton capacity crusher, had a Mexican assistant. Both crushers dumped into the same elevator, which carried the crushed rock up into an elevated bin, from which it was distributed to the extractors, which I shall describe later.

I worked all the morning, wondering what young Cursin could be doing with himself that he had not come round to visit me. But when I went to dinner, at noon, I found a note from him, saying he could stand it no longer, and he had gone off to catch the morning train.

I got out a pair of dogskin gloves from my trunk at noon, as my hands were nearly raw from the rough rock, and, as they were good English leather, by the time they wore out my hands were tough enough to stand the strain. By night I ached in every muscle, and I had cramp in my hands and wrists from the jar of the crusher, because, o............