hing for
him to fear from any one's inspection; he was a good superintendent.
"Don't stay long, Miss Leslie," he called down after us. I could no
longer see his face, but his voice sounded anxious, and father
remarked:

"Rutledge seems quite uneasy, somehow."

"Dese yer minin' bosses, dey knows dey business," muttered old Joe.
"Dey knows dat de rheumatiz hit lays in wait, like a wile beas'
scentin' hits prey. 'Spect's Mas'r Rutledge he hate fur ter see a
spry young gal like Miss Leslie git all crippled up, same's a ole
lame nigger."

"Yes; it must be that he feared Leslie would get the rheumatism,"
father said, in a lighter tone. Old Joe's explanations and reasons for
things were always a source of unfailing delight to him. The cage
reached the bottom of the shaft and we stepped out. By the light that
was always burning at the tunnel's mouth father and Joe each selected
a miner's lamp from the stock in a corner, and, as father was lighting
his, he said: "You had better carry a lamp, too, Leslie." I picked one
up while father slipped the bar of his under his cap band. Then he
glanced at my big hat. "You'll have to carry yours in your hand,
child; there's no room for so small a thing as a miner's lamp on that
great island of straw that you call a shade hat."

The Gray Eagle was a quartz gold mine. Tunnels drifted this way and
that, wherever deposits of the elusive metal led them; sometimes they
even made turns so sharp as to almost double back on themselves. I was
glad to see that the point where father and Joe halted, at last, to
pick up the tools that they had thrown down when they quit work in the
mine, was within sight of the twinkling yellow star that marked the
location of the hoisting cage. The place seemed less eerie somehow,
with this means of escape signaled in the darkness. I had been, as I
told Mr. Rutledge, in the mines a good many times, but never had its
darkness seemed so impenetrable, so encroaching, as on this morning.

"It seems to me that our lamps don't give so much light as usual, or
else what they do give does not go so far," I remarked to father as I
lingered beside him a few moments, watching him work.

He was using a drill on the face of the rock wall in front of him. He
suspended operations now to say: "I noticed that myself. The air is
thick and damp; the light is lost much as it is in a fog." Then he
called my attention to an object lying on the ground at his feet.
"There's the spade;