This done, he drags himself over the barricade, finds the saddle-bags again, and strikes a light. The candle flame is but a yellow puncture in the thick gloom of the tunnel, but it serves his purpose, which is to scrawl a few words on a blank page of an engineer's note-book,--sole reminder of the thrifty forecast of saner days beyond the descent into the nether depths. An imprecation bubbles up to punctuate the signature; a pointless cursing, which is no more than a verbal mask for a groan extorted by the agony of the effort to guide the pencil point. The malison strings itself out into broken sentences of justification; mere ravings, as pointless as the curse. "Finders are keepers,--that's the law of the strong. 'He that hath clean hands shall be stronger and stronger.' I found it and gave it back, and he drowned it in a bottle.... Now it is mine; and to-morrow I'll be dead. But she'll know that I haven't--that I haven't--quite--forgotten." To pain-blurred eyes the candle flame has faded to a nebulous point in the darkness, but still the light suffices. He has neither envelope nor sealing-wax, but he makes shift to seal the book with a wrapping of twine and a bit of pitch scraped from the nearest strut in the timbering. After which he seeks and finds the crevice in which Garvin kept his explosives; and when the note-book is safely hidden, drops exhausted behind the breastwork, with the rifle at his shoulder, beginning his vigil what time the first silvery flight of moon-arrows is pouring upon cliff-face and cabin opposite. CHAPTER XXI IT is a fact no less deprecable than true that events in orderly sequence do not always lend themselves to the purposes of a chronicler who would be glad to prick in his climaxes with a pen borrowed of the dramatist. With some little labor, and the help of not a few coincidences which may fairly be called fortuitous, the march of events in the life of Henry Jeffard has led up to a point at which the fictional unities pause, confidently anticipative of a climax which shall reëcho the heroic struggle of the Spartan few at Thermopylæ, or the daring-do of the Pontine Horatius. But the facts are inexorable and altogether disappointing. With prologue and stage-setting for a Sophoclean tragedy, the piece halts; hangs in the wind at the critical conjuncture like a misstaying ship; becomes, in point of fact, a mere modern comedy-drama with a touch of travesty in it; and the unities, fictional and dramatic, shriek and expire.