* * * * *

Charlie had got nearly home when he began to worry about a deep prospect
hole near the trail known as "Rosenhammer's Shaft." He must be careful
to avoid it. Suddenly his foot slipped on a pebble. He clutched
unavailingly at a manzanita and rolled into a circle of inky blackness.
Rosenhammer's Shaft! Now he was lost, indeed.

But, no. As he slid he came against a sturdy live-oak bush which he
clutched, managing to stop his descent into the next world for the time
being. He even, swung one leg over a wiry limb, and there he clung,
puttering sailors' argot, considering his sins, and roaring for help in
his best fortissimo tone.

The shaft was said to be a hundred feet deep. It was filled part way
with oily water, and inhabited by snakes and monsters of the
subterranean deeps. People had fallen in and drowned, and had been known
never to rise again. The ghost of a Chinaman who had been murdered and
flung down, was said to float up from its depths at night to range the
earth, seeking the perpetrator of the fiendish deed.

Charlie wished that he had led a more blameless life that he had not so
thoroughly beaten the Indian who had sold him a salted mine; that he had
not made Lizzie plow; that, above all, he had married the Widow Schmitt
when she had so plainly shown her liking for him.

Well, it did not matter much. He would fall in forty feet of water and
they would never find him. He wished that he had drunk that which the
jug contained. It was growing daylight. What was the day, then, to him?