Back behind the little cabin old Mike sat calmly smoking his black dudheen, apparently utterly oblivious to all the world save the bound and cursing Swede he was vigilantly guarding, and whose spirits he occasionally refreshed with some choice bit of Hibernian philosophy.

Beneath the flaring gleam of numerous gasoline torches, half a dozen men constantly passed and repassed between shaft-house and dump heap, casting weird shadows along the rough planking, and occasionally calling to each other, their gruff voices clear in the still night.

Every now and then those two silent watchers could hear the dismal clank of the windlass chain, and a rattle of ore on the dump, when the huge buckets were hoisted to the surface and emptied of their spoil.

Once--it must have been after three o'clock--other men seemed suddenly to mingle among those perspiring surface workers and the unmistakable neigh of a horse came faintly from out the blackness of a distant thicket.

The two lying in the chaparral rose to their knees, bending anxiously forward.