The old invariable formula came back to McTeague on the instant.

“What’s the show for a job?”

At once the German foreman became preoccupied, looking aimlessly out of the window.  There was a silence.

“You hev been miner alretty?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Know how to hendle pick’n shov’le?”

“Yes, I know.”

The other seemed unsatisfied.  “Are you a ’cousin Jack’?”

The dentist grinned.  This prejudice against Cornishmen he remembered too.

“No.  American.”

“How long sence you mine?”

“Oh, year or two.”

“Show your hends.”  McTeague exhibited his hard, callused palms.

“When ken you go to work?  I want a chuck-tender on der night-shift.”

“I can tend a chuck.  I’ll go on to-night.”

“What’s your name?”

The dentist started.  He had forgotten to be prepared for this.

“Huh?  What?”

“What’s the name?”

McTeague’s eye was caught by a railroad calendar hanging over the desk.  There was no time to think.

“Burlington,” he said, loudly.

The German took a card from a file and wrote it down.

“Give dis card to der boarding-boss, down at der boarding-haus, den gome find me bei der mill at sex o’clock, und I set you to work.”

Straight as a homing pigeon, and following a blind and unreasoned instinct, McTeague had returned to the Big Dipper mine.  Within a week’s time it seemed to him as though he had never been away.  He picked up his life again exactly where he had left it the day when his mother had sent him away with the travelling dentist, the charlatan who had set up his tent by the bunk house.  The house McTeague had once lived in was still there, occupied by one of the shift bosses and his family.  The dentist passed it on his way to and from the mine.

He himself slept in the bunk house with some thirty others of his shift.  At half-past five in the evening the cook at the boarding-house sounded a prolonged alarm upon a crowbar bent in the form of a triangle, that hung upon the porch of the boarding-house.  McTeague rose and dressed, and with his shift had supper.  Their lunch-pails were distributed to them.  Then he made his way to the tunnel mouth, climbed into a car in the waiting ore train, and was hauled into the mine.

Once inside, the hot evening air turned to a cool dampness, and the forest odors gave place to the smell of stale dynamite smoke, suggestive of burning rubber.  A cloud of steam came from McTeague’s mouth; underneath, the water swashed and rippled around the car-wheels, while the light from the miner’s candlesticks threw wavering blurs of pale yellow over the gray rotting quartz of the roof and walls.  Occasionally McTeague bent down his head to avoid the lagging of the roof or the projections of an overhanging shute.  From car to car all along the line the miners called to one another as the train trundled along, joshing and laughing.