The engineer sat down on a tool-box and waited.
"I'm a little late," he said, when Bartrow came down the path. "It's pay-day at the Bonanza. Get a lamp and let's go in and have a look at your new grief."
"You didn't need to tramp up here in the dark," Bartrow rejoined, feeling in a niche in the timbering for a miner's lamp. "I'd given you up for to-night."
"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.