Johnny, as he swung up the main street of the flat little town, the brick school-house and the two churches at one end, many saloons en route, and the gray rock dump and the chimneys and shaft-towers of the mine at the other, carried a ribbon of brightness through the sordid place.  Women came to the doors to smile at the handsome young gentleman who took his hat off as if they were ladies; children ran by his side, and he knocked their caps over their eyes and talked nonsense to them, and swung on whistling.  But at night, alone in his room, he was serious.  How to keep the men patient; how to use his influence with them; how to advise the president—­for young as he was he had to do this because of the hold he had gained on the situation; what concessions were wise—­the young face fell into grave lines as he sat, hands deep in his pockets as usual, and considered these questions.  Already the sculptor Life was chiselling away the easy curves with the tool of responsibility.

He thought of other things sometimes as he sat before the wood fire in his old Morris chair.  His college desk was in the corner by the window, and around it hung photographs ordered much as they had been in New Haven.  The portrait of his father on the desk, the painting of his mother, and above them, among the boys’ faces, the group of boys and girls of whom she was one, the girl whom he had not forgotten.  He had not seen her since that Tap Day.  She had written him soon after—­an invitation for a week-end at her mother’s camp in the woods.  But he would not go.  He sat in the big chair staring at the fire, this small room in the West, and thought about it.  No, he could not have gone to her house party—­how could he?  He had thought, poor lunatic, that there was an unspoken word between them; that she was different to him from what she was to the others.  Then she had failed him at the moment of need.  He would not be taken back half-way, with the crowd.  He could not.  So he had civilly ignored the hand which had held out several times, in several ways.  Hurt and proud, yet without conceit, he believed that she kept him at a distance, and would not risk coming too near, and so stayed altogether away.  It happens at times that a big, attractive, self-possessed man is secretly as shy, as fanciful, as the shyest girl—­if he cares.  Once and again indeed the idea flashed into the mind of Johnny McLean—­that perhaps she had been so sorry that she did not dare look at him.  But he flung that aside with a savage half-thought.

“What rot!  It’s probable that I was important enough for that, isn’t it?  You fool!” And about then he was likely to get up with a spring and attack a new book on pillar and shaft versus the block system of mining coal.

The busy days went on, and the work grew more absorbing, the atmosphere more charged with an electricity which foretold tempest.  The president knew that the personality of the young superintendent almost alone held the electricity in solution that for months he and his little musical club and his large popularity had kept off the strike.  Till at last a day came in early May.