Here his tormentors had stopped; why, he could not tell until he began to keep tally of what had passed his mouth: The long trains of cars had ceased; so had the snorting locomotives; so had the steam drills. Curious-looking boxes and kegs were being passed in, none of which ever came back; men with rolls of paper on which were zigzag markings stumbled inside, stayed an hour and stumbled out again; these men wore no lamps in their hats and were better dressed than the others. Then a huge wooden drum wrapped with wire was left overnight outside his lips and unrolled the next morning, every yard of it being stretched so far down his throat that he lost all track of it. On the following morning work of every kind ceased; not a man with a lamp anywhere--and these The Beast hated most; that is, none that he could see or feel. After an hour or more the head man arrived and with two others went inside. The head man was tall and fair, had gray side whiskers and wore a slouch hat; the second man was straight and well built, with a boyish face tanned by the weather. The third man was short and fat: this one carried a plan. Behind the three walked five other men. All were talking. “The dip is to the eastward,” the head man said. “The uplift ought to clear things so we won't have to handle the stuff twice. Hard to rig derricks on that slope. Let's have powder enough, anyhow, Bolton.” The fat man nodded and consulted his plan with the help of his eye-glasses. Then the three men and the five men passed in out of hearing. The Beast was sure now. The men were going to blow out the side of the hill where his hide was thinnest so as to make room for an air-shaft. An hour later a gang in charge of a red-shirted foreman who were shifting a section of toy track on the “fill” felt the earth shake under them. Then came a dull roar followed by a cloud of yellow smoke mounting skyward from an opening high up on the hillside. Flashing through this cloud leaped tongues of flame intermingled with rocks and splintered trees. From the tunnel's mouth streamed a thin, steel-colored gas that licked its way along the upper edges of the opening and was lost in the underbrush fringing its upper lip. “What's that?” muttered the red-shirted foreman--“that ain't no blast--My God!--they're blowed up!” He sprang on a car and waved his arms with all his might: “Drop them shovels! Git to the tunnel, every man of ye: here,--this way!” and he plunged on, the men scrambling after him. The Beast was a magnet now, drawing everything to its mouth. Gangs of men swarmed up the side of the hill; stumbling, falling; picking themselves up only to stumble and fall again. Down the railroad tracks swept a repair squad who had been straightening a switch, their foreman in the lead. From out of the cabins bareheaded women and children ran screaming.