“Well, next was about ten mile along, just before you come to the old Tin-cup Camp. We was passing the bluff there, and all of a sudden, rip, thump, biff! Down comes what looked like the whole side a-top of us. It weren’t though. It was only a cinnamon had lost his balance, leaning over too far to see what we was. That bear landed right agin brother inspector’s horse, and brother inspector’s horse tried to climb a tree. Inspector himself fell a-top of the bear. I dassent shoot, for the devil himself couldn’t have told which was inspector and which bear. Finally bear shakes himself loose and telescopes himself up the cañon, the worst scared animile in the country. ‘If you’ll ketch my horse, I’ll amble back again,’ says the inspector. ‘I’ve investigated this route pretty thorough, and find it’s just as you say. Lamp-posts’ll do me all right for a while.’ Come out fine, didn’t it?
“Whish there! Untie yourself, you yaller bone-heap!” And the mail was a quarter of a mile up the trail.
Jim pondered the information concerning Ches carefully, only to adhere to his original determination. He could not see any way in which the boy would be benefited by hearing the news. Still, the miner hated anything that savored of concealment or deception.
“I wish Anne was here to help me,” he thought; “she’d know what to do.”
He sat long, looking down, his hands clasped about his knees, drinking with old Tantalus. But the reverie ended as it always did—in action. There was nothing for it but the claim. Success there meant success everywhere.
It was the knowledge that Anne, the boy, and all he wished to do for both depended on the pay-streak which had urged him to such a fury of effort.
His carelessness of his own life, that led him to slap his timbering up any way, was born of that same fury. And the consequences came like most consequences, without a moment’s warning.
It was a still and beautiful noon. Ches had pulled out the last car before dinner, and started for the cabin.
A curious groaning and snapping from the tunnel halted him. It was the giving of the tortured timbers. On the heels of that came a dull, crushing roar. A blast of dust shot from the tunnel-mouth, like smoke from a cannon, preceded by a shock that nearly threw the boy off his feet.
Then all was still again. The sun shone as brilliantly as before, blazing down upon the ghastly face of a little boy, who, after one heart-broken cry of “Jim! Oh, Jim’s killed!” sank down upon the ground, chewing the fingers thrust in his mouth, that the pain might make the black wave keep its distance.