“What is your idea, Jim?” asked Browning.

“I mean to lay for Mackay, and when he comes down ask him, quietly, to read the writing when he gets up into daylight.”

“But what will he think we want?” asked Browning.

“He will know mighty quick,” said Sedgwick; “he knows where we work; he will understand that we know what we see, and that while we do not intend to give away the information, at the same time we do not want to ’get left out in the cold’ on this deal.”

“What think you he will do?” asked Browning.

“If he believes it safe, and the right kink is on him, he will draw our money and buy us some stock,” said Sedgwick.  “He made his money that way, and it is not long since he was a timberman on this same lode.”

“Why not word it differently, and ask him squarely to buy the stock?” asked Browning.

“Why, Jack,” was the reply, “that would be a dead give-away.  He would never present such an order at the bank.  It would be a notice to every man in the bank and every friend of every man in the bank, and that would mean everybody in town, that the miners who were kept down in the deeps were trying to buy the stock of the mine.  I would rather risk it this way.”

“All right, everything goes,” said Browning, and both signed the order.

Then they talked for a long time.  They had known each other slightly for a couple of years, having met first in the Belcher lower levels, and being thrown together in work on the face of the drift from the G. & C. shaft, they had, during the previous few days, each found that the other was a good and bright man, and had grown more and more intimate, and a warm friendship had sprung up between them.  As they lay down again, Browning said to Sedgwick, “How did you come to be here, Jim?”

“Fate arranged it, I guess,” was the reply.  “You see, my home was in Ohio, in the valley of the Miami.  My father had a big farm—­400 acres—­but there were two boys older than myself, and they needed the land.  I took to books naturally, and the plan was to give me an education, and then add a learned profession, or set me up in some little business.  So I went to school, and after awhile was sent to Oberlin College.  Queer old place, that!  Great place for praying and for teaching the universal brotherhood of man!  The result, I used to think, was that a colored man commanded a premium over a white man there.  I worried the thing through for three years and a half.  There was a young mulatto student in the school named Deering, who was a great deal too big for his clothes.  He was inclined to force himself into places where he was not wanted, and at anything like the manifestation of a desire to dispense with his society, he grew saucy in a moment.  I did not mind him, but he was vinegar and brimstone to a young student from Tennessee, a slight, weakly lad, but as brave a little chap as you ever saw, named Thorne.  Well, one day, for some impertinence, Thorne struck him.  Deering was an athlete; he weighed twenty pounds more than I did, fifty more than Thorne, I guess; he was quick as lightning, was most handy with his props, and in an instant he smashed poor Thorne’s face with a blow which knocked him half senseless.