Casey found the drift as silent as the main tunnel.

He went in ten feet or so and lighted the candle he had pulled from inside his shirt.

With the candle held in the swollen fingers of his injured hand, and a prospector's pick taken from the portal in his other, Casey went on cautiously, keeping an eye upon the roof which, to his wise, squinting eyes, looked perfectly solid and safe.
If a track had ever been laid in this drift it had long since been removed.

But a well-defined path led along its center with boot tracks going and coming, blurring one another with much passing.

Casey grinned and went on, his ears cocked for any sound before or behind, his shoes slung over his arm by their tied laces.
So he came, in the course of a hundred feet or so, to a crude door of split cedar slabs, the fastening padlocked on his side.