o down, Jim?" the doctor asked.

For reply the man held up his hands. Dick, close behind him and
peering forward to see them in the light that came from a street lamp,
saw they were a mass of blisters with the skin torn away, red and
bleeding. The answer was too eloquent to require words for the man
they called Jim had evidently been there and striving madly, as had
others, in the attempt to rescue. There was a surge forward as the
crowd pressed in, each man trying to inspect these evidences of the
tragedy. The questions were coming faster and from all sides. Most
frequently the anxious demand, coupled with a pronounced eagerness
was, "Is there anything any of us can do? Can we help if we get over
there?"

"How far over is it?" Bill asked the man nearest him.

"Forty-miles," was the answer. They were all willing to travel that
far, or farther, if they could be of any assistance whatever.

"No, there's no use in going," the man in the center said. "There's
more men there now than can be handled, and all they're doing is to
try to get at the boys' bodies. It's sure that they can't live till
they're taken out. You all know that! They're gone, every one of 'em.
And that ain't the worst. They left twenty-six widows, most of 'em
with children!"

A groan went up from the crowd. The word passed back along like the
waves cast up by a rock thrown into the center of a pool of blackness.
It began at the center with its repetition as the words were conveyed
to those out of earshot. "He says there's twenty-six widows. He says
there's a lot of children."

The questions were flowing inward again.

"No, boys, there ain't a thing you can do," the man they called Jim
repeated. "That is, there ain't a thing can be done for the boys
underground. They're gone; but somebody ought to do what can be done
for them that's left. It's money that helps the most. That's the best
way to show that most all of us had friends who went out."

He turned and climbed back into his saddle in the little open space,
and there was another moment's silence. The crowd looked up at him
now, as he sat there in the center of the light thrown downward,
feebly, from the lamp.

"Give me room, boys, won't you?" he asked. "My cayuse is about all in.
There ain't nothing more to tell. There ain't a thing you can do; but
just what I said. Those women and children will need money. They're
all broke."

The crowd slowly parted and he rode through a narrow lane wher