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Updated: September 5, 2025
He saw a row of large black portfolios on low supports, a sewing bag spilled its contents from a chair, a table bore a tin tobacco jar and the empty skin of a plantain. Then his gaze rested upon the floor, on a thin, inanimate body in crumpled alpaca trousers and dark jacket, with a peaked, congested face upturned toward the pale light. It was Lichfield Stope dead.
Fairchild forced his eyes in the direction designated and stared intently. At first it appeared only like a succession of disjointed, broken stones, lying in straggly fashion along the footwall of the drift where it widened into the stope, or upward slant on the vein.
Harry relieved Anita from her position on his shoulders, and then reconnoitered a moment before he gave the signal to proceed. Within the tunnel they went, to follow along its regular, rising course to the stope where, on that garish day when Taylor Bill and Blindeye Bozeman had led the enthusiastic parade through the streets, the vein had shown. It was dark there no one was at work.
"We were all badly scared, because that ground was always moving, and finally we agreed that we'd take a full hour off and work till five o'clock. Well, we waited till after one before we went to the collar and just as I was stepping into the cage the whole danged stope caved in!" "Well, sir, I went back to my room and got every dollar I had and gave Mother Trigedgo the roll.
He stood in a strained attitude, listening to the aberrations of the wind without, when an actual presence slipped by him, stopping in the middle of the floor. It was Millie Stope. Her eyes were opened to their widest extent, but they had the peculiar blank fixity of the eyes of the blind. Above them her hair slipped and slid in a loosened knot.
We found our way in here," he jerked his head toward his amateur tunnel, "by accident, in Thompson's time, one day when the stope happened to be empty; and we burrowed on to what looked like the anticlinal, before we heard the stope shift coming and had to slide out. But we'd seen enough to keep us burrowing.
He tested and rejected that possibility there could be no doubt of her absolute sanity. It was patent in a hundred details of her carriage, in her mentality as it had been revealed in her restrained, balanced narrative. There was, too, the element of her mother to be considered. Millie Stope had known very little about her, principally the self-evident fact of the latter's "brave heart."
There was an opening in the living rock, and as Collins lit another match where he stood below me, I saw it: a practicable manhole, slanting down behind my shelf so sharply that it must have been invisible from Thompson's stope, even in candlelight. Collins and Dunn swarmed up beside me, and the next second we all three slid through the black slit behind our ledge, and out somewhere else.
"It's just what we would look," said I. "You ass, Collins, with Macartney ignorant of the real way in on us, and he and his gang digging open Thompson's tunnel against the daylight, with you and me and Dunn in the dark on that shelf in Thompson's stope we came in here by, we'd have the drop on the lot. Except Marcia!" Her name jerked out of me.
And he answered, "No; I've done it right." That was every word we uttered till we were back on our high shelf, with a lit fuse left behind us in the stope. The fuse burned smooth as a dream, and Collins nudged me with fierce satisfaction. But I was suddenly sick with horror.
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