Larrabee started violently as the walls rang suddenly with the weird old voice, which, with its keen, false intonation, had so often struck terror to the stout hearts of the moonshiners of the Lost Time still. It was a voice of insistent command. He was urging his comrades to the work, and presently the regular strokes of the pick wielded by the stalwart "Tawm" set the echoes of the place to a hollow, melancholy iteration dreary to hear, and dismally blent with the rush of the cruel torrent. Espey's stroke seemed, in comparison, incidental and ineffective; but albeit both men worked apparently with a will, it was evidently quite at random, obeying implicitly now and again a gesture or command given in pursuance of some weak, wavering intention, and changed in a moment. The accident which had put the secret into Larrabee's hands seemed to him now so natural that he marveled that it had not been earlier revealed. But doubtless the vocation of the lost miners had served to connect the stroke of the pick with their gruesome fate, and thus the very fact of the sound, which must otherwise have betrayed the enterprise, aided the spectral traditions and the consequent avoidance of the place to preserve it. Would Espey have dared, he asked himself, to venture within, had he not feared the living more than the dead? And but for his own recognition of the humble lantern and its necessarily human uses he would, for fear of the spectral miners, hardly have tracked the old miner to his new lead. And suddenly, with the very thought, notwithstanding the perfectly natural solution of the mystery, he was solicitous as to the means of departure. He could not wait to follow that feeble lantern far enough in the background to insure his invisibility. He would not issue upon them now and advertise his discovery, and dismay the old dotard with his hopeless scheme. "I don't want to torment the pore old man," he said. He felt a keen thrill of savage joy to have discovered Espey's lair, but he would need some thought to secretly entrap him. "Fur ye air a mighty slick shirk, brother Jack," he said, with scorn. He was feeling some matches in his pockets, and judging of their number. Should they fail him before he reached the outer air, he could step aside and wait till the men should pass with the lantern. Its glimmer served now as long as the passage was comparatively straight; when it turned, himself out of the possibility of view, he struck the first match. The way was shorter than he had fancied. His store was not yet exhausted when he felt the warmer temperature from without, and saw the jagged outline of the portal and heard the melancholy dash of the rain; for it was once more "falling weather," and the sky was cloaked and gray.