Tregarvon told off three of the laborers to help Rucker, and sent the remaining three back to Coalville to report to Tryon, who, with another small squad, was replacing rotted cross-ties on the lower end of the tramway. After this, he beckoned to Carfax, and they went together down the shallow glade ravine to the spot where Rucker had found the burnt pine-knot torch and had driven his marking stake. Out of hearing of the four men left at the drilling-stand, Tregarvon said: “Well, the McNabbs are eliminated, definitely. It is fair to assume that a man wouldn’t be so careless as to get caught in a trap of his own setting.” “You would think not,” was Carfax’s rejoinder; but he did not say that it was impossible. On the ground where the torch-bearer of the previous night had stood they searched carefully for something that might give a working clue to the mystery of the moonlight survey. There was nothing, unless an oak-tree, with a half-overgrown “blaze” and some ancient markings cut in it, might be called a clue. Two or three hundred feet below the scarred oak lay the cliff edge, at this point something less than a precipice. Tregarvon stood on the brink, looking down over the rough, broken talus. A hundred yards below his perch the gray ribbon of the mountain pike leading to Coalville wound in and out among the trees and huge boulders. Farther around to the left, and almost on a level with the broken talus, he could see the head of the Ocoee tramway. At once he called Carfax’s attention to the favoring topographies. “If we should find our big vein anywhere between here and the tramhead, it would be almost as accessible as the old opening,” he said. “The track could be continued on an easy curve and grade, and there is drop enough to give us the gravity haul. I wonder if any one has ever looked along here for the outcrop?” Viewed from the summit, the rough declivity, rocky, wooded, and thickly-covered with a matted tangle of brier, laurel, and undergrowth, looked as if it had never been trodden by the foot of man. Carfax, leaning against a tree which grew on the extreme edge of the cliff, gave it as his opinion that the rocky slope had never felt the prospector’s pick. “They have to dig trenches or holes or something, in prospecting for coal, don’t they?” he asked; and when Tregarvon confirmed the surmise: “I should say that this toboggan-slide is just as old Madam Nature left it, shouldn’t you? Can we get from here to the tramhead without going back and around and over the mountain?” “Easily,” said Tregarvon, and he swung out and dropped over the low cliff to lead the way along the broken ledges.