It was warm in the tunnel, and Tom, having seen one train of the dump cars loaded, sat down to rest on an elevated ledge of rock, where he had made a sort of easy chair for himself, with empty cement bags for cushions.
The heat, his weariness and the monotonous clank-clank of a water pump near by, and the equally monotonous thump of the lumps of rocks in the cars made Tom drowsy. Almost before he knew it he was asleep.
What suddenly awakened him he could not tell. Perhaps it was some influence on the brain cells, as when a vivid dream causes us to start up from slumber, or it may have been a voice. For certainly Tom heard a voice, he declared afterward.
As he roused up he found himself staring at the rocky wall of the tunnel. And yet the wall seemed to have an opening in it and in the opening, as if it were in the frame of a picture, appeared the face Tom had seen at his library the day Job Titus called on him—the face of Waddington!
Tom sat up so quickly that he hit his head sharply on a projecting rock spur, and, for the moment he "saw stars." And with the appearance of these twinkling points of light the face of Waddington seemed to fade away, as might a vision in a dream.
"Bless my salt mackerel, as Mr. Damon would say!" cried Tom. "What have I discovered?"
He rubbed his head where he had struck it, and then passed his hand before his eyes, to make sure he was awake. But the vision, if vision it was, had vanished, and he saw only the bare rock wall. However, the echo of the voice remained in his ears, and, looking down toward the tunnel floor Tom saw Serato, the Indian foreman.
"Were you speaking to me?" asked Tom, for the man understood and spoke English fairly well.
"No, sar. I not know you there!" and the foreman seemed startled at seeing Tom. Clearly he was in a fright.
"You were speaking!" insisted Tom.