The clicking of the bones became louder, the struggle fiercer, the knives of the skeleton combatants rose and fell.  Then one staggered back and sank in a heap on the floor.

For a moment the victor swayed, tottered to the table, and gripped the mysterious object in its bony fingers.

As it stumbled weakly against the cabin wall the gruesome creature held the object up, and Rod saw that it was a roll of birch-bark!

An ember in the dying fire snapped with a sound like the report of a small pistol and Rod sat bolt upright, awake, staring, trembling.  What a horrible dream!  He drew in his cramped legs and approached the fire on his knees, holding his rifle in one hand while he piled on wood with the other.

What a horrible dream!

He shuddered and ran his eyes around the impenetrable wall of blackness that shut him in, the thought constantly flashing through his mind, what a horrible dream—­what a horrible dream!

He sat down again and watched the flames of his fire as they climbed higher and higher.  The light and the heat cheered him, and after a little he allowed his mind to dwell upon the adventure of his slumber.  It had made him sweat.  He took off his cap and found that the hair about his forehead was damp.

All the different phases of a dream return to one singly when awake, and it was with the suddenness of a shot that there came to Rod a remembrance of the skeleton hand held aloft, clutching between its gleaming fleshless fingers the roll of birch-bark.  And with that memory of his dream there came another—­the skeleton in the cabin was clutching a piece of birch-bark when they had buried it!

Could that crumpled bit of bark hold the secret of the lost mine?

Was it for the possession of that bark instead of the buckskin bag that the men had fought and died?

As the minutes passed Rod forgot his loneliness, forgot his nervousness and only thought of the possibilities of the new clue that had come to him in a dream.  Wabi and Mukoki had seen the bark clutched in the skeleton fingers, but they as well as he had given it no special significance, believing that it had been caught up in some terrible part of the struggle when both combatants were upon the floor, or perhaps in the dying agonies of the wounded man against the wall.  Rod remembered now that they had found no more birch-bark upon the floor, which they would have done if a supply had been kept there for kindling fires.  Step by step he went over the search they had made in the old cabin, and more and more satisfied did he become that the skeleton hand held something of importance for them.

He replenished his fire and waited impatiently for dawn.  At four o’clock, before day had begun to dispel the gloom of night, he cooked his breakfast and prepared his pack for the homeward journey.  Soon afterward a narrow rim of light broke through the rift in the chasm.  Slowly it crept downward, until the young hunter could make out objects near him and the walls of the mountains.