"Oh, I said I'd come, and I'm here. I know how it feels to be on the ragged edge,--been there myself. Is that the best lamp you could find? It isn't much better than a white bean. Pick it up a little higher so I can see the wet spots. It's too chilly to go in swimming to-night." They were picking their way through the damp tunnel, Bartrow ahead with the lamp held high. The "new grief" was an apparent change in the direction of the ore-bearing crevice from its slight inclination upward to a sharp pitch downward; and Bartrow had asked McMurtrie to come up and look at it. In the heading the engineer took the lamp and made a careful examination of the rock face of the cutting, tracing the outline of the vein with the flame of the lamp, and picking off bits of the shattered rock to determine the lines of cleavage. Bartrow stood aside and waited for the verdict; waited with a tense thrill of nervousness which was quite new to him; and the monotonous drip-drip of the water percolating through the tunnel roof magnified itself into a din like the ringing of hammers upon an anvil. "Well, what do you say?" he queried, when the engineer made an end and began to fill his pipe. "You're in for it, Dick,--here, hold this lamp a minute, will you? It's a pretty well-defined dip in the formation, and I'm afraid it has come to stay. That means an incline." The echo took up Bartrow's ironical laugh and gave it back in mocking reiteration. "Yes; an incline at the end of a four-hundred-and-forty-foot tunnel, and a steam hoist, and a pumping outfit, and a few other little knickknacks. Say a couple of thousand dollars or so before I can turn a wheel." McMurtrie bent to light his pipe at the flame of the lamp. "That's about the size of it. Hold that lamp still, can't you?" "Hold it yourself," retorted Bartrow; and he took a turn in the darkness to steady his nerves. When he stumbled back into the dim nimbus of lamplight he had fought and won his small battle. "Don't lay it up against me, Mac," he said, in blunt contrition. "It knocked me out for a minute. You know I've been backing my luck here for all I'm worth." "Yes, I know that. What will you do now?" "Quit; come off the perch; shut up shop and pull down the blinds. It's all there is to do." "And give it up?" "And give it up. Bank's broke; or at least it will be when I've paid the men another time or two." McMurtrie had Scotch blood in his veins, and was cannily chary of offering unasked advice. None the less, he did it. "I'd borrow a little more nerve and go on, if it were mine." "So would I if I could." "Can't you?" Bartrow said "no," changed it to "yes," and then qualified the assent until it, too, became a negation. "It's a pity," was the engineer's comment. "I believe another hundred feet would let you in for a decently good thing." "So do I. But it might as well be a thousand. I know when I'm downed."