r exhaustion and fall from the ladder. And when picked
up by the crew at the bottom of the shaft, he was fit for nothing but to
be thrown like carrion into the nearest unused pit, walled in with a
half-dozen shovelfuls of earth, and left at last to rest.

The overseer by the shaft glanced at his water-clock, raised a reed to
his lips, and blew a shrill whistle. From level to level and from
gallery to gallery this was taken up and repeated in fainter cadences,
and with it the insistent tapping of the picks ceased. One by one men
began to hurry forth from the galleries, making for the ladders which
led to the world of air and sunlight.

Nicanor came from one of the branching tunnels, a pick over his
shoulder, stripped to the waist and grimed with sweat and dirt, his
lean chest and arms thrown out against the murky candle-light. He was
all bone and skin and muscle, hard as nails; but it was the dead,
springless hardness which comes to an athlete badly overtrained, not the
resilient firmness which denotes good condition. He laid his pick on the
ground near the entrance of the tunnel and went to the ladder. Even his
tread had lost something of its cat-like lightness; he walked wearily,
his shoulders bowed. He gave his number to the overseer, who barely
waited to record it in his tablet, with the time he had stopped work,
before starting up the ladder for his half-hour's intermission. Nicanor,
suddenly alert, ran back into the tunnel, reappeared with a bag, which
he held carefully, and started up the ladder also. But at the next
level, thirty feet above, he stopped, instead of keeping on to the
surface.

In the shaft-chamber here were a dozen and odd men gathered, but there
seemed to be no overseer among them. A ring had formed about a space on
the floor under one of the lamps; men craned over the shoulders of those
in front of them. One saw Nicanor and shouted at him.

"Well come, friend! We wait for you and that pretty pet of yours!"

He was a short man who spoke, with arms immensely long and hairy, and a
seamed face of a shortness out of all proportion to its width, as though
crown of head and chin had been pressed together in a vise. Of the
others, all were more or less as black as Ethiopians with grime; many
were shaven and mutilated, with lips slit or an ear gone. Some were
branded; and the backs of many were scored with the marks of floggings,
some long healed, others red and raw. No fouler-mouthed crew of
despera