“I want to go into the tunnel and have a look around before any of you do any work,” he added. “This fellow was up to some mischief, and I want to find out what it was.” Cig’s palate went dry. He knew better than they did in what a predicament he had put himself. If he let the thing go through as originally intended, these men would never let him reach a sheriff. If he confessed--what would they do to him? He ate mechanically and yet voraciously, for the exercise of the night had left him hungry. But every moment his mind was sifting the facts of the case for an out. Hollister rose to leave. “Take care of this fellow till I get back, Tom. I don’t know what he was up to, but if anything happens to me, rush him right down to Daniels.” “We will--in a pig’s eye,” the foreman answered bluntly. “If anything happens to you, we’ll give this bird his, muy pronto.” The engineer was lifting the flap of the tent when Cig spoke huskily from a parched throat. “I’ll go along wid youse.” “All right.” Not the least change of expression in his face showed that Hollister knew he had won, knew he had broken down the fellow’s stiff and sullen resistance. Cig shuffled beside Tug to the tunnel. The months had made a difference in the bearing of the ex-service man. When the New Yorker had met him first, Hollister’s mental attitude found expression in the way he walked. He was a tramp, in clothes, in spirit, in habit of life, and in the way he carried his body. The shoulders drooped, the feet dragged, the expression of the face was cynical. Since then there had been relit in him the spark of self-respect. He was a new man. He stepped aside, to let Cig pass first into the tunnel. At the entrance he lit two candles and handed one to his prisoner. “What did you want to come for?” he asked. “Have you something to show me? Or something to tell me?” Cig moved forward. He spoke over his shoulder, protecting the candle with one hand. “Just a bit of a lark. Thought I’d throw a scare into yore men.” “How?” The former convict continued through the tunnel to the face of the rock wall. He set his candle down on a niche of jutting sandstone. With his fingers he scraped away some sand from the ragged wall. “What’s that?” Hollister’s voice was sharp. He held out his hand. “Let’s have it.” From beneath the sand Cig had taken a stick of dynamite. He dug up five others. The object of putting them there was plain enough. If a workman had struck any one of them with a pick, there would have been an explosion, and the sand beds round the rocks were precisely the places into which the pick points would have gone. The thing had been a deliberate attempt at cold-blooded wholesale murder. “Sure you have them all?” Hollister asked. “Yep. Had only six.” He added, with a whine: “Didn’t aim to hurt any o’ the boys, but only to scare ’em some.”