But the other answered straight; he had evidently worked in half a dozen
of the camps. In Mateo he had paid a dollar a month for wash-house
privileges, and there had never been any water after the first three men
had washed. There had been a common wash-tub for all the men, an
unthinkably filthy arrangement. At Pine Creek--Hal found the very naming
of the place made his heart stand still--at Pine Creek he had boarded
with his boss, but the roof of the building leaked, and everything he
owned was ruined; the boss would do nothing--yet when the boarder moved,
he lost his job. At East Ridge, this man and a couple of other fellows
had rented a two room cabin and started to board themselves, in spite of
the fact that they had to pay a dollar-fifty a sack for potatoes and
eleven cents a pound for sugar at the company store. They had continued
until they made the discovery that the water supply had run short, and
that the water for which they were paying the company a dollar a month
was being pumped from the bottom of the mine, where the filth of mules
and men was plentiful!

Hal forced himself to remain non-committal; he shook his head and said
it was too bad, but the workers always got it in the neck, and he didn't
see what they could do about it. So they strolled back to the camp, the
stranger evidently baffled, and Hal, for his part, feeling like the
reader of a detective story at the end of the first chapter. Was this
young man the murderer, or was he the hero? One would have to read on in
the book to find out!



SECTION 26.