The contractor glared, started to speak, then gaining control of himself, turned and walked away. Rush, in the meantime, was energetically throwing dirt and when the long day was ended he had shoveled into ore cars ten tons of soft ore. The lad handed his tally slip to the contractor at the close of the day's work.
"Only ten tons!" he groaned. "You'll have to do better than that. Unless you can handle twelve you're not fit to be below ground."
"I understand, sir, that twelve tons a day is the record and that only one man has accomplished that in the last ten years," answered the boy promptly. "But I'll equal it before I am through here; not especially to gratify you, but for my own satisfaction."
"How many tons a day does he get out of this contract?" asked Steve, as he was waiting for the cage to ascend to the surface.
"Fifty tons is the most we ever got out in a day," was the answer from Steve's companion.
"That we don't know. He never tells his business. Some contractors get less and some more, depending upon how the ore runs, how much paint rock there is to be thrown out in the dirt."
Steve was always seeking for information, and what he was learning in these early days was to serve him well in the future.
For the rest of the week he worked diligently, increasing his daily output by at least a ton. One day he fell considerably below this, as the ore came out hard and was not delivered to the car men as fast as they could handle it. That was a day that Spooner was at his worst.
Saturday came, the day that the young miner was to receive his first pay envelope. He had made it a practice to carry his lunch below and eat it there. This saved him considerable effort, and gave him an opportunity to rest before the whistles blew to resume work. Steve usually chose some quiet spot in an unused drift, where, seating himself by the side of a little stream of water trickling from the rocks, he would stick his candle-holder in a crevice and tuck the cover of his dinner pail under the trickling stream to catch water to drink with his meal.
He had just settled himself down for his noon-day meal, on this Saturday afternoon, when he was attracted by a bobbing candle on a miner's cap approaching him from down the drift just off the main level.