shouting drifted behind me and died out as I surmounted the last knoll
and descended to bed. It was only at breakfast next morning that I
learned I had serenely strolled through a pitched battle between bandits
that haunted the recesses of the mountains about Calderon and the town
which, led by its jefe politico, had finally won the bout with four
outlaw corpses to its credit. It was my luck not to have even a
bullet-hole through my cap to prove the story. There were often two or
three such battles a week in the vicinity.

That morning I was given a new job. The boss led the way, candle in
hand, a half mile back through the bowels of the mountain, winding with
the swinging of the former ore vein. This alone was enough to get
hopelessly lost in, even without its many blind-alley branches. Now and
then we came upon another shaft-opening that seemed a bottomless hole a
few feet in diameter in the solid rock, from far down which came up the
falsetto voices and the stinking sweat of peons, and the rap, rap of
heavy hammers on iron rock-bars. But we had only started. Far back in
the gallery we took another hoist and descended some two hundred feet
more, then wound off again through the mountain by more labyrinthian
burrowings in the rock, winding, undulating passages, often so low we
must crawl on hands and knees, with no other light than the flickering
candles half-showing shadowy forms of naked, copper-colored beings; the
shadows giving them often fiendish faces and movements, until we could
easily imagine ourselves in the realms of Dante's imagination. In time
we came to a ladder leading upward into a narrow dark hole, and when the
ladder ended we climbed on our bellies some forty feet higher up a ledge
of rock to another "heading." Along this we made our way another
hundred yards or more to where a dozen naked peons were operating
compressed-air drills, then wormed our way like snakes over the
resultant debris to the present end of the passage, where more peons