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.