Before long Hal had a chance to see this system of espionage at work, and he began to understand something of the force which kept these silent and patient armies at their tasks. On a Sunday morning he was strolling with his mule-driver friend Tim Rafferty, a kindly lad with a pair of dreamy blue eyes in his coal-smutted face. They came to Tim's home, and he invited Hal to come in and meet his family. The father was a bowed and toil-worn man, but with tremendous strength in his solid frame, the product of many generations of labour in coal-mines. He was known as “Old Rafferty,” despite the fact that he was well under fifty. He had been a pit-boy at the age of nine, and he showed Hal a faded leather album with pictures of his ancestors in the “oul' country”—men with sad, deeply lined faces, sitting very stiff and solemn to have their presentments made permanent for posterity. The mother of the family was a gaunt, grey-haired woman, with no teeth, but with a warm heart. Hal took to her, because her home was clean; he sat on the family door-step, amid a crowd of little Rafferties with newly-washed Sunday faces, and fascinated them with tales of adventures cribbed from Clark Russell and Captain Mayne Reid. As a reward he was invited to stay for dinner, and had a clean knife and fork, and a clean plate of steaming hot potatoes, with two slices of salt pork on the side. It was so wonderful that he forthwith inquired if he might forsake his company boarding-house and come and board with them.
Mrs. Rafferty opened wide her eyes. “Sure,” exclaimed she, “do you think you'd be let?”
“Why not?” asked Hal.
“Sure, 't would be a bad example for the others.”
“Do you mean I have to board at Reminitsky's?”
“There be six company boardin'-houses,” said the woman.
“And what would they do if I came to you?”
“First you'd get a hint, ............