the
cause which had provoked it. Rand was at work in the shaft, Ruth having
that morning undertaken the replenishment of the larder with game
from the wooded skirt of the mountain. Rand had taken advantage of his
brother's absence to "prospect" in the "drift,"--a proceeding utterly at
variance with his previous condemnation of all such speculative essay;
but Rand, despite his assumption of a superior practical nature, was not
above certain local superstitions. Having that morning put on his gray
flannel shirt wrong side out,--an abstraction recognized among the
miners as the sure forerunner of divination and treasure-discovery,--he
could not forego that opportunity of trying his luck, without
hazarding a dangerous example. He was also conscious of feeling
"chipper,"--another local expression for buoyancy of spirit, not common
to men who work fifty feet below the surface, without the stimulus of
air and sunshine, and not to be overlooked as an important factor in
fortunate adventure. Nevertheless, noon came without the discovery of
any treasure. He had attacked the walls on either side of the lateral
"drift" skilfully, so as to expose their quality without destroying
their cohesive integrity, but had found nothing. Once or twice,
returning to the shaft for rest and air, its grim silence had seemed to
him pervaded with some vague echo of cheerful holiday voices above. This
set him to thinking of his brother's equally extravagant fancy of
the wailing voices in the air on the night of the fire, and of his
attributing it to a lover's abstraction.

"I laid it to his being struck after that gal; and yet," Rand continued
to himself, "here's me, who haven't been foolin' round no gal, and dog
my skin if I didn't think I heard one singin' up thar!" He put his foot
on the lower round of the ladder, paused, and slowly ascended a dozen
steps. Here he paused again. All at once the whole shaft was filled with
the musical vibrations of a woman's song. Seizing the rope that hung
idly from the windlass, he half climbed, half swung himself, to the
surface.

The voice was there; but the sudden transition to the dazzling level
before him at first blinded his eyes, so that he took in only by degrees
the unwonted spectacle of the singer,--a pretty girl, standing on tiptoe
on a bowlder not a dozen yards from him, utterly absorbed in tying a
gayly-striped neckerchief, evidently taken from her own plump throat, to
the halliards of a freshly-cut