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.
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