in favour of as uncomfortable a confinement as possible, and so disapproved of blankets, but Fay insisted.  After that the brothers manned the windlass and let Jim down in a bowline about twenty feet, while he detached and removed two lengths of the shaft ladder.  This left no means of ascent, as the walls of the shaft were smoothly timbered; but, to make matters sure, they covered the mouth with inch thick boards on which they piled large chunks of ore.

“You don’t suppose they’ll smother?” suggested Bert.

“Not much!  There’s only three of them, and often men drilling will stay down ten or twelve hours at a time without using up the air.”

“Sweet dreams, gentlemen!” called the irrepressible Jeems in farewell.

“There’s one other thing,” said Jim, “and then we can crawl in.”

He approached the cabin in which Arthur and his wife were accustomed to sleep, and listened until he had satisfied himself that Mrs. Arthur was inside.  Then he softly locked the door, the key of which he had appropriated immediately after supper, and propped shut the heavy wooden shutter of the window.

“No dramatic escapes in ours, thank you!” he muttered.  He drew back and surveyed his work with satisfaction.  “Come on, boys, let’s turn in.  To-morrow we slave.”

CHAPTER XXI

THE LAND OF VISIONS

Although he had retired so early, and in so exhausted a condition, Bennington de Laney could not sleep.  He had taken a slight fever, and the wound in his shoulder was stiff and painful.  For hours on end he lay flat on his back, staring at the dim illuminations of the windows and listening to the faint out-of-door noises or the sharper borings of insects in the logs of the structure.  His mind was not active.  He lay in a semi-torpor, whose most vivid consciousness was that of mental discomfort and the interminability of time.

The events of the day rose up before him, but he seemed to loathe them merely because they had been of so active a character, and now he could not bear to have his brain teased even with their impalpable shadow.

Strangely enough, this altitude seemed to create a certain dead polarity between him and them.  They lay sullenly outside his brain, repelled by this dead polarity, and he looked at them languidly, against the dim illumination of the window, with a dull joy that they could not come near him and enter the realm of his thoughts.  All this was the fever.

In a little time these events became endowed with more palpable bodies which moved.  The square of semilucent window faded into something indescribable, and that into something indescribable, and that into something else, still indescribable.