"And is that what cut your hands?" asked Lieutenant Murray. "Why, they're a sight! For heaven's sake, what have you been doing?"
"I found a 'cave-in' of rock and gravel right at the end of that tunnel," answered Genesee, nodding the way they had just come, and drawing their notice to fresh earth and broken stone thrown to the side. "I had no tools here, nothing but that," and he motioned toward a mallet-like thing of stone. "My tools were moved from the mine over to Scot's Mountain awhile back, and as that truck had to be hoisted away, and I hadn't time to invite help, it had to be done with these;" and he held out his hands that were bleeding—a telling witness of his endeavors to reach there in time. And every man of them felt it.
There was an impulsive move forward, and Hardy was the first to hold out his hand. But Genesee stepped back, and leaned against the wall.
"That's all right, Hardy," he said, with something of his old careless smile. "I'm glad you're the first, for the sake of old times; but I reckon it would be playing it pretty low down on a friend to let him take me in on false pretenses. You see I haven't been acquitted of horse-stealing yet—about the most low-lived trade a man can turn to, unless it is sheep-stealing."
"Oh, hell!" broke in one of the men, "this clears the horse business so far as I'm concerned, and I can bet on the other boys, too!"
"Can you?" asked Genesee, with a sort of elated, yet conservative, air; "but this isn't your game or the boys' game. I'm playing a lone hand, and not begging either. That torch ready?"
The rebuff kept the others from any advance, if they had thought of making it. Lieutenant Murray had picked up the stone mallet and was examining it by the flickering light; one side was flattened a little, like a tomahawk.
"That's a queer affair," he remarked. "What did you have it made for?"
"Have it made! The chances are that thing was made before Columbus ever managed a sail-boat," returned Genesee. "I found a lot of them in here; wedges, too, and such."
"In here?" and the men looked with a new interest at the rocky walls. "What is it?"