The final touch of sunset pink had long since faded from the high western sky-line, and the summer-night stars served only to make the darkness visible along the road which had once been the stage route down the Timanyoni River and across to the mining-camp of Red Butte. Smith, slackening speed for the first time in the swift valley-crossing flight, twisted the gray roadster sharply to the left out of the road, and eased it across the railroad track to send it lurching and bumping over the rotting ties of an old branch-line spur from which the steel had been removed, and which ran in a course roughly paralleling the eastward-facing front of a forested mountain. Four miles from the turn out of the main road, at a point on the spur right of way where a washed-out culvert made farther progress with the car impossible, he shut off the power and got down to continue his journey afoot. Following the line of the abandoned spur, he came, at the end of another mile, to the deserted shacks of the mining plant which the short branch railroad had been built to serve; a roofless power-house, empty ore platforms dry-rotting in disuse, windowless bunk shanties, and the long, low bulk of a log-built commissary. The mine workings were tunnel-driven in the mountainside, and a crooked ore track led out to them. Smith followed the ore track until he came to the bulkheaded entrance flanked by empty storage bins, and to the lock of a small door framed in the bulkheading he applied a key. It was pitch dark beyond the door, and the silence was like that of the grave. Smith had brought a candle on his food-carrying visit of the day before, and, groping in its hiding-place just outside of the door, he found and lighted it, holding it sheltered in his cupped hand as he stepped into the black void beyond the bulkhead. With the feeble flame making little more than a dim yellow nimbus in the gloom, he looked about him. There was no sign of occupancy save Jibbey's suitcase lying where it had been flung on the night of the assisted disappearance. But of the man himself there was no trace. Smith stumbled forward into the black depths and the chill of the place laid hold upon him and shook him like the premonitory shiver of an approaching ague. What if the darkness and solitude had been too much for Jibbey's untried fortitude and the poor wretch had crawled away into the dismal labyrinth to lose himself and die? The searcher stopped and listened. In some far-distant ramification of the mine he could hear the _drip, drip_, of underground water, but when he shouted there was no response save that made by the echoes moaning and whispering in the stoped-out caverns overhead.