first right-hand
drift he stopped again and listened. This, if he would believe Joe,
was the drift where the bad ground had caused the accident to Joe and
his partner whose leg had been broken. 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. Casey had
vaguely expected some such bar to his path, and he merely gave a grunt
of satisfaction that the lock was old and on his side of the door.

With his jackknife Casey speedily took off one side of the lock and
opened it. Making the door appear locked behind him when he had passed
through was a different matter, and Casey did not attempt it. Instead,
he merely closed the door behind him, carrying the padlock in with him.

As Casey reviewed his situation, being on the butte at all was a risk
in itself. One detail more or less could not matter so much. Besides,
he was a bold Casey Ryan with two loaded half-sticks of dynamite in his
sling.

A crude ladder against the wall of a roomy stope beyond the door did
not in the least surprise him. He had expected something of this sort.
When he had topped the ladder and found himself in a chamber that
stretched away into blackness, he grunted again his mental confirmation
of a theory working out beautifully in fact. His candle held close to
the wall, he moved forward along the well-trodden path, looking for a
door. Mechanically he noticed also the formation of the wall and the
vein of ore--probably high-grade in pockets, at least--that had caused
this chamber to be dug. The ore, he judged, had long since been taken
out and down through the stope into the tunnel and so out through the
main portal. These workings were old and for mining purposes abandon