ruin of his pardner's work. It was over this that his
path lay, as deadly dangerous a path as could be found. The slightest
disturbing of the roof above might bring down a thousand tons of dirt
upon the one who ventured, slowly and hideously to crush his life out,
there in the dark, beyond sight and sound of the cheerful world without.
With this knowledge before him, and his inborn fear of the dark hole, as
daunting as the hand of death itself, he took his soul in his gripe, and
wormed his way within.

Sometimes his back grazed a stone in the roof, and the touch of white-hot
iron could not have been so terrible; sometimes a falling stone near him
would make his heart leap and stop as he waited for the hill above to
follow. Foot by foot he made it, twisting around the end of a post,
scooping out the dirt most cautiously where the hole was too small for
even his slight body.

Once the sharp end of a broken piece of lagging caught in his clothes,
and he could go neither forward nor back. There, for a second, he broke
down. Bracing up again, he managed somehow to get the old knife out of
his pocket and cut himself free.

He could see little.

A gray spectral light filtered in here and there that defined nothing,
even when his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.

It was an endless journey. In places where the dirt closed in he would be
a full minute progressing a foot, and a minute of such mortal terror as
seldom falls to the lot of man of peace or soldier.

But it ended.

Suddenly the boy's outstretched hand encountered only emptiness below.
That frame had held. He dove into the space head first, and landed on
something soft and warm--the body of his pardner.

He had found him. In a paroxysm of joy, he flung himself upon the
motionless figure and cried his heart out. This, too, he soon conquered.
Jim had just so much show--any delay might wipe it out. He searched the
man's pockets until he found a match. By its light he saw the candle
stuck into the post, and lit it. Then he knelt beside his pardner again.

It was a curious picture within that gloomy chamber underground. The
miner lying stark, stretched to his full great length, appearing enormous
in the flickering candle-light, and the child, white-faced, big-eyed, but
steady as a veteran, wiping the blood from the ragged cut in the man's
head.

Ches realized what had happened the instant before the calamity. Jim,
startled by the noise of the yielding timbers