A red, unwinking eye staring at him fixedly from out of impenetrable gloom—­an ogreish, gleaming thing that brought life back into him with a thrill of horror—­was Howland’s first vision of returning consciousness.  It was dead in front of him, on a level with his face—­a ball of yellow fire that seemed to burn into his very soul.  He tried to cry out, but no sound fell from his lips; he strove to move, to fight himself away, but there was no power of movement in his limbs.  The eye grew larger.  He saw that it was so bright it cast a halo, and the halo widened before his own staring eyes until the dense gloom about it seemed to be melting away.  Then he knew.  It was a lantern in front of him, not more than ten feet away.  Consciousness flooded him, and he made another effort to cry out, to free his arms from an invisible clutch that held him powerless.  At first he thought this was the clutch of human hands; then as the lantern-light revealed more clearly the things about him and the outlines of his own figure, he saw that it was a rope, and he knew that he was unable to cry out because of something tight and suffocating about his mouth.

The truth came to him swiftly.  He had come up to the coyote on a sledge.  Some one had struck him.  He remembered that men had half-dragged him over the rocks, and these men had bound and gagged him, and left him here, with the lantern staring him in the face.  But where was he?  He shifted his eyes, straining to penetrate the gloom.  Ahead of him, just beyond the light, there was a black wall; he could not move his head, but he saw where that same wall closed in on the left.  He turned his gaze upward, and it ended with that same imprisoning barrier of rock.  Then he looked down, and the cry of horror that rose in his throat died in a muffled groan.  The light fell dimly on a sack—­two of them—­three—­a tightly packed wall of them.

He knew now what had happened.  He was imprisoned in the coyote, and the sacks about him were filled with powder.  He was sitting on something hard—­a box—­fifty pounds of dynamite!  The cold sweat stood out in beads on his face, glistening in the lantern-glow.  From between his feet a thin, white, ghostly line ran out until it lost itself in the blackness under the lantern.  It was the fuse, leading to the box of dynamite on which he was sitting!

Madly he struggled at the thongs that bound him until he sank exhausted against the row of powder sacks at his back.  Like words of fire the last warning of Meleese burned in his brain—­“You must go, to-morrow—­to-morrow—­or they will kill you!” And this was the way in which he was to die!  There flamed before his eyes the terrible spectacle which he had witnessed a few hours before—­the holocaust of fire and smoke and thunder that had disrupted a mountain, a chaos of writhing, twisting fury, and in that moment his heart seemed to cease its beating.  He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself.  Was it possible