uitter, Miss Dwight? Keeling over just like a sick baby."

The young woman choked over her answer. "You mustn't talk yet. Drink
this, please."

He drank, and later he ate sparingly of the food she had hastily
gathered from the dinner table and brought with her. In jerky little
sentences he sketched his adventure, mingling fiction with fact as the
fever grew on him again.

Bleyer, himself a game man, could not withhold his admiration after he
had heard Captain Kilmeny's story of what he had found below. The two,
with Moya, were riding behind the wagon in which the rescued man lay.

"Think of the pluck of the fellow--boring away at that cave-in when any
minute a million tons of rock and dirt might tumble down and crush the
life out of him. That's a big enough thing. But add to it his game leg
and his wound and starvation on top of that. I'll give it to him for the
gamest fellow that ever went down into a mine."

"That's not all," the captain added quietly. "He must have tunneled in
about twenty-five feet when the roof caved again. Clean bowled out as he
was, Jack tackled the job a second time."

Moya could not think of what had taken place without a film coming over
her eyes and a sob choking her throat. A vagabond and worse he might be,
but Jack Kilmeny held her love beyond recall. It was useless to remind
herself that he was unworthy. None the less, she gloried in the splendid
courage of the man. It flooded her veins joyously even while her heart
was full to overflowing with tender pity for his sufferings. Whatever
else he might be, Jack Kilmeny was every inch a man. He had in him the
dynamic spark that brought him smiling in his weakness from the presence
of the tragedy that had almost engulfed him.

There was a little discussion between Colter and Captain Kilmeny as to
which of them should take care of the invalid. The captain urged that he
would get better care at the hotel, where Lady Farquhar and India could
look after him. Colter referred the matter to Jack.

"I'm not going to burden Lady Farquhar or India. Colter can look out for
me," the sick man said.

"It's no trouble. India won't be satisfied unless you come to the
hotel," Moya said in a low voice.

He looked at her, was about to decline, and changed his mind. The
appeal in her eyes was too potent.

"I'm in the hands of my friends. Settle it any way you like, Miss
Dwight. Do whatever you want with me, except put me back in that hell."

After a d