loose, shaking his fist at the sky, or at the weigh-boss--behind the
latter's back. He might gather a knot of fellow-grumblers about him; it
was to be noted that the camp-marshal had the habit of being on hand at
this hour.

It was on one of these occasions that Hal first noticed Mike Sikoria, a
grizzle-haired old Slovak, who had spent twenty years in the mines of
these regions. All the bitterness of all the wrongs of all these years
welled up in Old Mike, as he shouted his score aloud: "Nineteen,
twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty! Is that my weight, Mister? You want me
to believe that's my weight?"

"That's your weight," said the weigh-boss, coldly.

"Well, by Judas, your scale is off, Mister! Look at them cars--them cars
is big! You measure them cars, Mister--seven feet long, three and a half
feet high, four feet wide. And you tell me them don't go but twenty?"

"You don't load them right," said the boss.

"Don't load them right?" echoed the old miner; he became suddenly
plaintive, as if more hurt than angered by such an insinuation. "You
know all the years I work, and you tell me I don't know a load? When I
load a car, I load him like a miner, I don't load him like a Jap, that
don't know about a mine! I put it up--I chunk it up like a stack of hay.
I load him square--like that." With gestures the old fellow was
illustrating what he meant. "See there! There's a ton on the top, and a
ton and a half on the bottom--and you tell me I get only nineteen,
twenty!"