e
side of the rock. While Gordon would have been relieved had his
comrade acted more circumspectly, he was not surprised. There were, he
knew, times when men under strain broke out into an unreasoning fury.
He had seen one hewing savagely on the perilous side of a tremendous
tottering tree, and another grimly driving the bolts that could not
save it into the stringers of a collapsing wooden bridge. It was, as
he recognized, not exactly courage that they had displayed, but the
elemental savagery that in the newer countries, at least, now and then
seizes on hard-driven men ground down by mortgage-holders, or ruined
by flood and frost. With man and Nature against them they would make
their last grim protest before they were crushed. Gordon once or twice
had been conscious of the same fierce desire. He could sympathize with
Nasmyth, but, after all, he wished he would not bang the giant-powder
about in that unceremonious fashion.

"Leave the magazine yonder, and we'll bring it along," he cried.

Nasmyth made no answer, but he waited until Gordon and Mattawa joined
him, and they lowered themselves down from a rock shelf on to a pile
of broken rock, about which the eddy swirled. The spray of the fall
beat upon them, and the roar of it was bewildering, but the noise was
softened when they crawled into the entrance of a narrow tunnel.
Mattawa, with considerable difficulty, struck a match, and a pale
light streamed out from the little metal lamp he fastened in his hat.
The light showed the ragged roof of the tunnel and the rivulet of icy
water that flowed in the bottom of it. They crawled forward through
the water for a few yards, vainly trying to avoid the deluge which
broke upon them from the fissures, and finally sat down dripping on a
pile of broken rock. Nasmyth took out his pipe, and was lighting it
when Gordon drew the magazine away from him.

"You might just as well have done that before you opened the thing,"
he remarked. "Anyway, if you merely want to sit down, it would have
been quite as comfortable in the shanty."

Nasmyth was silent for several moments; then he turned to the other
two men with a wry smile.

"I don't quite know how we drove this heading with the tools we had,
but I can't think of any means of saving it," he said. "There are men
with money--Martial, and more of them--in the cities waiting to take
away from us what we expect to get, and since we have to fight them,
it seems to me advisable to stri