Casey found the drift as silent as the main tunnel.-He went in ten feet or so and lighted the candle he had pulled from inside his shirt. With the candle held in the swollen fingers of his injured hand, and a prospector's pick taken from the portal in his other, Casey went on cautiously, keeping an eye upon the roof which, to his wise, squinting eyes, looked perfectly solid and safe.
If a track had ever been laid in this drift it had long since been removed.-But a well-defined path led along its center with boot tracks going and coming, blurring one another with much passing. Casey grinned and went on, his ears cocked for any sound before or behind, his shoes slung over his arm by their tied laces.
So he came, in the course of a hundred feet or so, to a crude door of split cedar slabs, the fastening padlocked on his side.
Casey had vaguely expected some such bar to his path, and he merely gave a grunt of satisfaction that the lock was old and on his side of the door.
With his jackknife Casey speedily took off one side of the lock and opened it.-Making the door appear locked behind him when he had passed through was a different matter, and Casey did not attempt it.-Instead, he merely closed the door behind him, carrying the padlock in with him.
As Casey reviewed his situation, being on the butte at all was a risk in itself.-One detail more or less could not matter so much. Besides, he was a bold Casey Ryan with two loaded half-sticks of dynamite in his sling.
A crude ladder against the wall of a roomy stope beyond the door did not in the least surprise him.-He had expected something of this sort.-When he had topped the ladder and found himself in a chamber that stretched away into blackness, he grunted again his mental confirmation of a theory working out beautifully in fact.
His candle held close to the wall, he moved forward along the well-trodden path, looking for a door.-Mechanically he noticed also the formation of the wall and the vein of ore--probably high-grade in pockets, at least--that had caused this chamber to be dug.-The ore, he judged, had long since been taken out and down through the stope into the tunnel and so out through the main portal. These workings were old and for mining purposes abandoned.-But just now Casey was absorbed in solving the one angle of the mystery which he had stumbled upon at first, and he gave no more than a glance and a thought to the silent testimony of the rock walls.
He found the door, fastened also on the outside just as he had expected it would be.-Beside it stood a rather clever heating apparatus which Casey did not examine in detail.-His Irish heart was beating rather fast while he unfastened the door.-Beyond that door his thoughts went questing eagerly but he hesitated nevertheless before he lifted his knuckles and rapped.
There was no reply.-Casey waited a minute, knocked again, then pulled the door open a crack and looked in.-The old woman sat there rocking back and forth, steadily, quietly.-But her thin fingers were rolling a corner of her apron hem painstakingly, as if she meant to hem it again.-Her eyes were fixed absently upon the futile task.-Casey watched her as long as he dared and cleared his throat twice in the hope that she would notice him.
But the old woman rocked back and forth and rolled her apron hem; unrolled it and carefully rolled it again.
"Good morning, ma'am," said Casey, clearing his throat for the third time and coming a step into the room with his candle dripping wax on the floor.
For just an instant the uneasy fingers paused in their rolling of the apron hem.-For just so long the rockers hesitated in their motion.-But the old woman did not reply nor turn her face toward him; and Casey pushed the door shut behind him and took two more steps toward her.
"I come to see if yuh needed anything, ma'am; a friend, mebbe."
Casey grinned amiably, wanting to reassure her if it were possible to make her aware of his presence.-"They had yuh locked in, ma'am. That don't look good to Casey Ryan.-If yuh wanta get out--if they got yuh held a prisoner here, or anything like 'that, you can trust Casey Ryan any old time. Is--can I do anything for yuh, ma'am?" The old woman dropped her hands to her lap and held them there, closely clasped.-Her head swung slowly round until she was looking at Casey with that awful, fixed stare she had heretofore directed at the wall or the floor.
"Tell those hell-hounds they have a thousand years to burn--every one of them!" she said in a deep, low voice that had in it a singing resonance like a chant.-"Every cat, every rat, every mouse, every louse, has a thousand year's to burn.-Tell Mart the hounds of hell must burn!"-Her voice carried a terrible condemnation far beyond the meaning of the words themselves.-It was as if she were pronouncing the doom of the whole world.
"Every cat, every rat, every mouse, every louse--"
Casey Ryan's jaw dropped an inch.-He backed until he was against the door.-He had to swallow twice before he could find his voice, and those of you who know Casey Ryan will appreciate that.
He waited until she had finished her declaration.
"No, ma'am, you're wrong.-I come up here to see if I could help yuh."
"Hounds of hell--black as the bottomless pit that spewed you forth to prey upon mankind!-The world will have to burn.-Tell those hounds of hell that bay at the gibbous moon the world will have to burn.-Every cat, every rat, every mouse, every louse has a thousand years to burn!"
Casey Ryan, with his mouth half open and his eyes rather wild, furtively opened the door behind him.-Still meeting fixedly the dull glare of the old woman's eyes, Casey slid out through the door and fastened it hastily behind him.-With an uneasy glance now and then over his shoulder as if he feared the old woman might be in pursuit of him, he hurried back down the ladder to the closed door in the drift, pulled the door shut behind him and put the padlock in place before he breathed naturally.