en. I wish I were
one of those poor lads, to die with a smile like that!"

Scorrier felt the futility of his presence. On Pippin alone must be the
heat and burden. Would he stand under it, or would the whole thing come
crashing to the ground? He urged him again and again to rest, but Pippin
only gave him one of his queer smiles. "You don't know how strong I am!"
he said.

IV

He himself slept heavily; and, waking at dawn, went down. Pippin was
still at his desk; his pen had dropped; he was asleep. The ink was wet;
Scorrier's eye caught the opening words:

"GENTLEMEN,--Since this happened I have not slept...."

He stole away again with a sense of indignation that no one could be
dragged in to share that fight. The London Board-room rose before his
mind. He imagined the portentous gravity of Hemmings; his face and
voice and manner conveying the impression that he alone could save
the situation; the six directors, all men of commonsense and certainly
humane, seated behind large turret-shaped inkpots; the concern and
irritation in their voices, asking how it could have happened; their
comments: "An awful thing!" "I suppose Pippin is doing the best he can!"
"Wire him on no account to leave the mine idle!" "Poor devils!" "A
fund? Of course, what ought we to give?" He had a strong conviction that
nothing of all this would disturb the commonsense with which they would
go home and eat their mutton. A good thing too; the less it was taken
to heart the better! But Scorrier felt angry. The fight was so unfair!
A fellow all nerves--with not a soul to help him! Well, it was his own
lookout! He had chosen to centre it all in himself, to make himself its
very soul. If he gave way now, the ship must go down! By a thin thread,
Scorrier's hero-worship still held. 'Man against nature,' he thought,
'I back the man.' The struggle in which he was so powerless to give
aid, became intensely personal to him, as if he had engaged his own good
faith therein.

The next day they went down again to the pit-head; and Scorrier himself
descended. The fumes had almost cleared, but there were some places
which would never be reached. At the end of the day all but four bodies
had been recovered. "In the day o' judgment," a miner said, "they
four'll come out of here." Those unclaimed bodies haunted Scorrier. He
came on sentences of writing, where men waiting to be suffocated had
written down their feelings. In one place, the hour, the word "Sle