William had never expected to return here for a second time so soon.
Perhaps after enduring months of torment, his luck had finally turned. Not long after they split up, he met a local villager who claimed he was willing to guide them farther down.
He didn't want to waste time because of Kraft's attitude. The anxiety of standing before a treasure vault without being able to enter, or perhaps some other reason he couldn't think of just then—all of it had him moving as if his feet had started on their own. Like a man caught in his own momentum, he crossed the rocky mountainside once more, lit a torch at the mine entrance, and went straight inside.
By the time he realized he might be a little too eager, he had reached the end of the mining area again. The stooped old man was walking ahead of him.
The torch flame flickered in William's hand as he stopped there, vaguely wondering whether there was something unreasonable about what he was doing. He came up with nothing. The sailors behind him stopped too, waiting for their captain's orders.
Hearing their footsteps stop, the old man turned his bony, spiked neck. He twisted halfway around and fixed the tiny clear point in his cloudy, sunken eye sockets on them. His barrel-shaped chest, ribs plainly visible, stretched his loose clothes. The deep hollows were just like those of the other elderly local men. The slack skin at the front of his neck sagged, inexplicably reminding William of a torn sail caught by a gale around a broken mast.
Given his age and condition, this old man shouldn't have been working anymore—and certainly shouldn't have been capable of it. He ought to have been unfamiliar with a new mine that had only