Ralph resolved, at any rate, to do all that lay in his power toward the attainment of useful and honorable manhood.  He did not set his mark so very high, but the way to it was rough with obstacles and bordered with daily toil.

His plan was, simply to find better places for himself about the breaker and the mines, as his age and strength would permit, and so to do his work as to gain the confidence of his employers.  When he should become old enough, he would be a miner’s laborer, then a miner, and perhaps, eventually, he might rise to the position of a mine boss.  He would improve his leisure with self study, get what schooling he could, and, finally, as the height of his ambition, he hoped that, some day, he might become a mining engineer; able to sink shafts, to direct headings, to map out the devious courses of the mine, or to build great breakers like the one in which he spent his days.

Having marked out his course he began to follow it.  He labored earnestly and with a will.  The breaker boss said that no cleaner coal was emptied into the cars at the loading place than that which came down through Ralph’s chute.

His plan was successful as it was bound to be, and it was not long before a better place was offered to him.  It was that of a driver boy in the mine below the breaker.  He accepted it; the wages were much better than those he was now receiving, and it was a long step ahead toward the end he had in view.

But the work was new and strange to him.  He did not like it.  He did not think, at first, that he ever could like it.  It was so dark in the mines, so desolate, so lonely.  He grew accustomed to the place, however, as the days went by, and then he began not to mind it so much after all.  He had more responsibility here, but the work was not so tiresome and monotonous as it had been in the screen-room, and he could be in motion all the time.

He went down the shaft every morning with a load of miners and laborers, carrying his whip and his dinner-pail, and a lighted lamp fastened to the front of his cap.  When he reached the bottom of the shaft he hurried to the inside plane, and up the slope to the stables to get his mule.  The mule’s name was Jasper.  Nobody knew why he had been named Jasper, but when Ralph called him by that name he always came to him.  He was a very intelligent animal, but he had an exceedingly bad habit of kicking.

It was Ralph’s duty to take the mule from the stable, to fasten him to a trip of empty mine cars, and to make him draw them to the little cluster of chambers at the end of the branch that turned off from the upper-level heading.

This was the farthest point from the shaft in the entire mine.  The distance from the head of the plane alone was more than a mile, and it was from the head of the plane that Ralph took the cars.  When he reached the end of his route he left one car of his trip at the foot of each chamber in which it was needed, gathered together into a new trip the loaded cars that had been pushed down to the main track for him, and started back with them to the head of the plane.