"This here," said he, "hes bin made fast from the inside too—jest like the door. Look in them bunks. Three bunks and nothin’ but blankets. And over the floor the blankets is layin’ too, hauled about." The light from the hatch above was now streaming in. "Them blankets is all chawed up," he said. "Heavens!" I gasped. "Were they driven to that?" "What devils me," he said, not replying to my remark but looking round the place with a kind of anxiety visible on his forehead, "is this here fixin’ up from the inside. There’s blankets, picks, shovels, all the outfit, and there’s the windlass and tackle for the shaft-head. No," he said, recollecting my remark, "them blankets was n’t chawed up by them. Rats has been in here—and thick. See all the sign o’ them there?" He pointed to the floor, but it was then that I observed, in a corner, after the fashion of a three-cornered cupboard, a rough shelving that had been made there. Every shelf, I saw, was heaped up with something,—but what? I stepped nearer and scrutinised. "Look at all the bones here," I said. Canlan was at my side on the very words. "That’s him!" he said, in a gasp of relief. "That’s him. That’s number three. That’s him that stuck up the door and the smoke hole." I turned on him, the unspoken question in my face, I have no doubt. All the fear had departed from his face now as he snatched up a bone out of one of the shelves. These bones, I should say, were all placed as neatly and systematically as you could wish, built up in stacks, and all clear and clean as though they had been bleached. "This here was his forearm," said Canlan, his yellow eyeballs suddenly afire with a fearsome light; and he rapped me over the knuckles with a human elbow. "Ain’t it terrible?" he said. "It is terrible," said I. "Ah!" he cried. "But I don’t mean what you mean; I mean ain’t it terrible to think o’ that?" and he pointed to the cupboard, "to think o’ comin’ to that—bein’ picked clean like that—little bits o’ you runnin’ about all over them almighty hills inside the rats’ bellies and your bones piled away to turn yellow in a spidery cupboard." I stepped back from his grinning face. "But how do these bones come there?" I said. "It’s the rats," he replied, "them mountain rats always pile away the bones o’ everything they eat—make a reg’lar cache o’ them; what for I dunno; but they do; that’s all." I stood then looking about the place, thinking of the end of that "number three," all the horror of his last hours in my mind; and as I was thus employed, with absent mien, suddenly Canlan laid his hand on my arm. "What you lookin’ that queer, strained ways for?" he whispered, putting his face within an inch of mine, so that I stepped back from the near presence of him. "That was a mighty queer look in your eyes right now. Say; do you know what you would make? You’d make an easy mark for me to mesmerise. You ’d make a fine medium, you would."