“Who is it?” a hoarse voice demanded.

But before she could answer a match flared and was held close to her face.  The same light that revealed her to him told the girl who this man was that had met her alone a million miles from human aid.  The haggard, drawn countenance with the lifted upper lip and the sunken eyes that glared into hers belonged to the convict Nick Struve.

The match went out before either of them spoke.

“You—­ you here!” she exclaimed, and was oddly conscious that her relief at meeting even him had wiped out for the present her fear of the man.

“For God’s sake, have you got anything to eat?” he breathed thickly.

It had been part of the play that each member of their little party should carry a dinner-pail just like an ordinary miner.  Wherefore she had hers still in her hand.

“Yes, and I have a candle here.  Have you another match?”

He lit the candle with a shaking hand.

“Gimme that bucket,” he ordered gruffly, and began to devour ravenously the food he found in it, tearing at sandwiches and gulping them down like a hungry dog.

“What day is this?” he stopped to ask after he had stayed the first pangs.

She told him Tuesday.

“I ain’t eaten since Saturday,” he told her.  “I figured it was a week.  There ain’t any days in this place—­ nothin’ but night.  Can’t tell one from another.”

“It’s terrible,” she agreed.

His appetite was wolfish.  She could see that he was spent, so weak with hunger that he had reeled against the wall as she handed him the dinner-pail.  Pallor was on the sunken face, and exhaustion in the trembling hands and unsteady gait.

“I’m about all in, what with hunger and all I been through.  I thought I was out of my head when I heard you holler.”  He snatched up the candle from the place where he had set it and searched her face by its flame.  “How come you down here?  You didn’t come alone.  What you doin’ here?” he demanded suspiciously.

“I came down with Mr. Dunke and a, friend to look over his mine.  I had never been in one before.”

“Dunke!” A spasm of rage swept the man’s face.  “You’re a friend of his, are you?  Where is he?  If you came with him how come you to be roaming around alone?”

“I got lost.  Then my light went out.”

“So you’re a friend of Dunke, that damned double-crosser!  He’s a millionaire, you think, a big man in this Western country.  That’s what he claims, eh?” Struve shook a fist into the air in a mad burst of passion.  “Just watch me blow him higher’n a kite.  I know what he is, and I got proof.  The Judas!  I keep my mug shut and do time while he gets off scot-free and makes his pile.  But you listen to me, ma’am.  Your friend ain’t nothin’ but an outlaw.  If he got his like I got mine he’d be at Yuma to-day.  Your brother could a-told you.  Dunke was at the head of the gang that held up that train.