She would have taken his hand, but Lockwood, the pain all forgot, the confusion all vanishing, was on his feet. It was as though a curtain that for months had hung between him and the blessed light of clear understanding had suddenly been rent in twain by her words. The woman stood revealed. All the baseness of her tribe, all the degraded savagery of a degenerate race, all the capabilities for wrong, for sordid treachery, that lay dormant in her, leaped to life at this unguarded moment, and in that new light, that now at last she had herself let in, stood pitilessly revealed, a loathsome thing, hateful as malevolence itself. "What," shouted Lockwood, "you think--think that I--that I _could_--oh-h, it's monstrous--_you_----" He could find no words to voice his loathing. Swiftly he turned away from her, the last spark of an evil love dying down forever in his breast. It was a transformation, a thing as sudden as a miracle, as conclusive as a miracle, and with all a miracle's sense of uplift and power. In a second of time the scales seemed to fall from the man's eyes, fetters from his limbs; he saw, and he was free. At the door Lockwood met the doctor: "Well?" "He's all right; only a superficial wound. He'll recover. But you--how about you? All right? Well, that is a good hearing. You've had a lucky escape, my boy." "I _have_ had a lucky escape," shouted Lockwood. "You don't know just how lucky it was." A BARGAIN WITH PEG-LEG "Hey, youse!" shouted the car-boy. He brought his trundling, jolting, loose-jointed car to a halt by the face of the drift. "Hey, youse!" he shouted again. Bunt shut off the Burly air-drill and nodded. "Chaw," he remarked to me. We clambered into the car, and, as the boy released the brake, rolled out into the main tunnel of the Big Dipple, and banged and bumped down the long incline that led to the mouth. "Chaw" was dinner. It was one o'clock in the morning, and the men on the night shift were taking their midnight spell off. Bunt was back at his old occupation of miner, and I--the one loafer of all that little world of workers--had brought him a bottle of beer to go with the "chaw"; for Bunt and I were ancient friends. As we emerged from the cool, cave-like dampness of the mine and ran out into the wonderful night air of the Sierra foothills, warm, dry, redolent of witch-hazel, the carboy began to cough, and, after we had climbed out of the car and had sat down on the embankment to eat and drink, Bunt observed: "D'ye hear that bark? That kid's a one-lunger for fair. Which ain't no salubrious graft for him--this hiking cars about in the bowels of the earth, Some day he'll sure up an' quit. Ought to go down to Yuma a spell."