Again and again in his durance Larrabee had prefigured how swift would be his flight along the tunnel to the free outer air. Now he feebly plodded, and trembled, and faltered, and again went groping along the densely black way, essaying to keep a straight line, but feeling himself continually touching the wall, now on the right, and again on the left, in his zigzag course. Once he paused with an alert start. A sound of human voices had struck his ear, and at the merest possibility that his escape was not complete, certain, every flaccid, exhausted muscle was tense again. He lifted up his head, hardly breathing, that he might listen, but heard only the uncontrolled motion of his own heart plunging like an unruly horse. All else was silent in the black stillness of the deeps of the earth, save for the slight purling of the thread of a stream which farther on intersected the tunnel. No stir, no sound from the still-room, his late prison-house, where his jailers lay bound hand and foot; and yet he had thought he heard voices--human voices--words--he could almost have sworn it. And suddenly the sound came again. This time he recognized it,--louder than its custom, more distinct, for he had heard it before,--the sound of the strange, unexplained voices that at long intervals were wont to reverberate along the tunnel of the Lost Time mine, and that were accounted by the moonshiners echoes from their own wrangles or mirth or talk as they toiled. He was certain that it did not come now from the still; his fear that his work had been slack, and that his comrades were liberated, was without foundation, but an earthly rational fear is a wonderful exorcist of a ghostly terror. Otherwise, when he thought of it afterward, he felt that he must have been struck dead with the horror of it, when he suddenly heard, close at hand, the sound dulled by the dense medium of the earth, a word of command, as it were, in a queer, strained, false-ringing voice, and then the regular strokes of a pick cleaving the earth with a workmanlike steadiness and precision. His blood ran cold; for his credulity harbored no doubts. It was the sound of the drowned miners, lost in the flooded shafts, still vainly digging the graves that the niggard earth denied them. The thought mended his speed; he flew like a shuttlecock from side to side of the narrow passage, where he could but grope, for the lack of a lantern; and although he often put forth his hands expecting to touch the boards of the partition at the further end, he thrust into his palms a score of the hairy splinters of the reverse side of the rude puncheons long before he could have reasonably expected to reach his goal. He observed none of the precautions and silence common to the moonshiners in their exits from the still; and indeed the feat was hardly expected to be attempted in the dense darkness. He dropped one of the boards, and the deep, cavernous, clamorous echo coming up from the hollow vaults below