The paroxysm, if so it might be called, passed in a moment, and he was laughing as he stood at the aperture of the tunnel, holding the lantern, red-faced and a trifle shamefaced, when Copley, left far behind, came hobbling up slowly and painfully. Taft was quite restored; it was with his own assured, definite manner and elastic stride that he presently took his way along the tunnel again and applied the match to the fuse. He evidently accomplished his work thoroughly, for he had no doubts of its efficacy when he returned and stood leaning against a pile of boxes, waiting quite carelessly as here and there tiny stellular lights sprang up along that darksome way that was not wont to blossom out such constellations. Stars? No; lines of fire, vermicular, writhing, growing, serpentine, swiftly gliding, armed with venom, with destruction under their forked tongues; for suddenly a flare, a frightful clap as of thunder, a wrench as if the foundations of the earth were torn asunder, and the two men were thrown to the ground and the lantern extinguished in the jar. The reverberations were slow to die away; only gradually quiet came. A stillness ensued, stifling with dust, and with such strong sense of alternation with that moment of deafening detonation that the pulses quivered with expectancy, and the slightest movement set the nerves to jarring. Taft had groped for a light, and as the faint coruscation of a match, then the steadier gleam of the lantern, pierced the darkness, the nearest results of the explosion were open to view. The timbers roofing the tunnel had been shaken down, and close at hand masses of earth had fallen with them and lay banked at the very door. If Taft had been warned in a dream, he could hardly have made his defense more perfect. He and his one trusted adherent worked there the rest of the night. The old original timbers of the house, partly rotten and time-stained, were replaced as formerly, leaving no trace that there had ever been an entrance into the abandoned mine; and when at last Taft clambered through the aperture of the counter into the store, he left the door broadly flaring after him. "Trust Sis ter notice it," he remarked. "She'll git used ter it in ten minits, an' it'll 'pear like she always knowed 't war thar." The still was conveyed some miles away and buried in a marked spot, and thus the business of moonshining was abandoned at the moment when the project of the summer hotel, from which it had so much to fear, was pretermitted amidst its varied entanglements, and the Cove, which certainly could not have comfortably contained both, was left without either for the nonce. XV.