What had happened he was unable, in the first fierce struggle for freedom, fully to determine.  It was as if a living hand had reached down to pin him fast in the tunnel-like space.  Then he discovered that a huge splinter on one of the joists was thrust like a great barb into his coat.  Ordinarily cool and collected in the face of emergencies, the ex-engineer lost his head for a second or so and fought like a trapped animal.  Then the frenzy fit passed and the quick wit reasserted itself.  Extending his arms over his head and digging his toes into the dry earth for a purchase, he backed, crab-wise, out of the entangled coat, freed the coat, and made for the narrow exit in a sweating panic of excitement.

Notwithstanding the excitement, however, the recovered wit was taking note of the movements of the men who were leaving the room overhead.  They were not going out by the direct way—­out of the door facing the moonlight and the mining hamlet.  They were passing out through the store-room in the rear.  Also, there were other foot-falls—­cautious treadings, these—­as of some third person hastening to be first at the more distant door of egress.

Judson was out of his dodge-hole and flitting from pine to pine on the upper hill-side in time to see a man leap from the loading platform at the warehouse end of the building and run for the sheltering shadows of the timbering at the mine entrance.  Following closely upon the heels of their mysterious file leader came the two whose footsteps Judson had been timing, and these, too, crossed quickly to the tunnel mouth of the mine and disappeared within it.

Judson pursued swiftly and without a moment’s hesitation.  Happily for him, the tunnel was lighted at intervals by electric incandescents, their tiny filaments glowing mistily against the wet and glistening tunnel roof.  Going softly, he caught a glimpse of the two men as they passed under one of the lights in the receding tunnel depths, and a moment later he could have sworn that a third, doubtless the man who had leaped from the loading platform to run and hide in the shadows at the mine mouth, passed the same light, going in the same direction.

A hundred yards deeper into the mountain there was a confirming repetition of the flash-light picture for the ex-engineer.  The two men, walking rapidly now, one a step in advance of the other, passed under another of the overhead light bulbs, and this time Judson, watching for the third man, saw him quite plainly.  The sight gave him a start.  The third man was tall, and he wore a soft hat drawn low over his face.

“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” muttered the trailer, pulling his cap down to his ears and quickening his pace.  “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that was Hallock again—­or Hallock’s shadder follerin’ him at a good long range!”