"Well, Throcker, my boy, my ledge of Cherokee runs up here from the Canaan Tigmores, d'you know that?" said Madeira. He put his thumbs in his pockets and rocked upon the balls of his feet with a springing, tip-toe movement, as Throcker stopped them in front of a shaft out of whose cavernous depths a cage was swinging toward them. From Madeira's manner you might have inferred that the Cherokee had a Madeira permit to "run up here." In the cage it was necessary for Steering to extend his arm behind Miss Madeira, as there were no sides between the great cables at the four corners. It was not a very large cage and the number on it crowded it, so that the girl rested lightly on Steering's arm. He could think of no place so deep down that he would not be well satisfied to journey to it like that. But there came a jolt and a jar, the cage settled upon the stope, and the journey was over. Throcker led the way through a thick underground gloom. Great masses of crush-rock slid under foot, there was a black drip from ceiling and walls, and the excavation was filled with the hollow boom of the water-and air-pumps. With lights flaring uncertainly, they followed the mine-boss out upon a rocky crag that gave upon a deep abyss, faintly illuminated by the flicker of the lamps of the working force below and by torches set in the wall. There was an upward slope in the formation of the ledge from the bottom of the cavern to the spur upon which they stood, but it was made by irregular juttings with ugly, saw-tooth projections. Unless they were very near the edge they could not follow the dim outline of the slope at all. Throcker in his eagerness to point out the ore, shining like specks of gold all up and down the slope, worked dangerously near the edge, but he was accustomed and recovered his balance easily when a piece of his support crumbled away under his feet. Steering, who was agile and athletic, had no difficulty in keeping up with the miner, but Madeira had to be watchful. The miner would not let Miss Madeira come far out on the crag, though he let the men follow him, calling warnings to them as they came. "From where you stand, Miss Sally," Throcker turned toward the girl who waited below the summit of the crag, "from where you stand up to here, the loose ore is worth about sixty-five thousand dollars!" The girl looked up at them responsively. Standing there under the strange flickering light of her torch, with the black folds of the rubber coat swathing her, her face, with its fine eyes, was cut out for Steering sharp as a cameo. "I am delighted for your sake, Mr. Throcker," she called gaily, but with a little uneasiness in her voice. "Father, please be careful." "Sixty-five thousand dollars! Why, Lord love you, Throcker, a hundred thousand, if one." Madeira, taking charge of the probabilities in the case, moved toward the edge to support his estimate by measuring with his eye the distance down the crag.