This was terribly tantalising; and after the brief illumination of the match, a more impenetrable darkness seemed to have settled upon the pass and the rocks around; so, at all hazards, he resolved to get still nearer. He was perhaps a little unguarded in his eagerness, and made some slight noise, and it is certain that he had not calculated all the hazards which might environ him, for a low fierce growl showed that a dog was with the men, and the spy shuddered with horror as he heard the sound.
‘Did you hear anything?’ said a harsh voice. ‘The dog would not have growled like that, unless some one was hanging around.’
‘Nonsense!’ returned the other; and the voice was certainly the voice of Rube Steele. ‘He heard a jack-rabbit, perhaps, or scented a polecat. I reckon there ain’t a soul within a league of this cañon to-night. The miners are all at Flume City, and the Indians have left the district for more than a week past.’
‘You may be right,’ returned the first speaker. ‘But the dog is uneasy, and I never knew him give them signs for game or venison; no, nor for Injun neither. I should have said there was a white man near. But we air a little too much in the line of the main pass to show a light, which we must do. Come behind this rock.—Good dog!—mind ’em!’ These last words were of course addressed to the dog, which had continued to growl at intervals while his master was speaking, although the unseen watcher had lain as still as death. The animal was apparently soothed by being thus noticed, and probably followed the men, whose footsteps could be heard as they removed to the proposed cover behind the Big Loaf Rock.
The spy had no inclination to follow them to learn more, but crawled carefully and noiselessly over the ground until he was at a safe distance from the pass; so far, indeed, that he judged that even the acute ears and scent of the dog could not detect him when he rose, and hurried in the direction of the city as fast as his legs could carry him.
On the outskirts, he knocked at the door of a shanty, a log-built hut with earthen floor, such as the Mexican peasantry, and even their betters, often reside in; and in answer to a gruff challenge from within—for the inmates were in bed, or stretched on such pallets as served for beds—he returned an answer which seemed to satisfy the questioner, for after a little more gruff grumbling, the door was opened, and he was admitted.
In answer to his inquiry, the gruff voice said: ‘No; nary drop of anything but water; ye kin have that. Your voice sounds all of a tremble, Absalom; and if ye don’t get shot over the cards or drown yourself, I guess ye won’t last long as a miner, anyhow.’
Absalom, as he was called, hesitated for a moment, as though about to say something in his defence, but eventually decided on making no reply to this rather unpleasant speech, and threw himself down on a buffalo skin which the other man pushed towards him. No further conversation took place, and the shanty was as dark and silent as were the remainder of the scattered dwellings on the outskirts of Flume City.
CURIOSITIES OF THE ELECTRIC LIGHT.
The first curiosity of the electric light was of course its discovery in 1802 by Humphry Davy, then an assistant-lecturer at the Royal Institution. With one of the new batteries which Volta had invented two years before, Davy was surprised to get a brilliant white light when the poles of the battery were joined through two pieces of carbon. Later on, his astonishment was increased when he found how intensely hot was this ‘arch’ of carbon light—the hottest known artificial source. ‘Platinum,’ he wrote, ‘was melted as readily as is wax in the flame of a common candle; quartz, the sapphire, magnesia, lime, all entered into fusion.’ Even the diamond swells out into a black mass in the electric arc, and carbon itself has been known to soften. Dr Siemens, as is well known, utilised this fervent heat to fuse metals in a crucible. With the arc from a dynamo capable of giving a light of five thousand candles, he fused fifteen pounds of broken files in as many minutes. Indeed, the temperature of the arc ranges from two thousand to five thousand degrees Centigrade. Another curiosity of the arc is that it can be shown in water or other liquids without quenching. Liquids have a diffusive action on the light; and a globule of fused oxide of iron between platinum wires conveying the current, produces a very fine golden light. The fused plaster of Paris between the carbons of the Jablochkoff candle also forms a brilliant source of light in the arc; as does the marble separator which answers the same purpose in the lampe soleil. Indeed, this white-hot marble, rendered luminous by the arc, gives out a mellow radiance so closely resembling sunshine as to give the lamp its name. Such a light is very suitable for illuminating picture-galleries.