forbidding Anton
and Jim to speak.

Clem was willing enough to tell his tale.

He began with the incident in the cage, on the morning of the
accident, when he had joked with Otto, to the old miner's manifest
objection. He told of Otto's refusal to work that day, according to
the account given him by Jim. He described, also, how Anton had
gallantly abandoned his own chance of safety to come and warn him, and
explained how they had vainly searched an outlet in the direction of
the North Gallery.

"Right after we met Jim," he went on, "we ran as fast as we could
towards the old workings, to see if we could get out there. I didn't
think there was much chance, because, so far as I could make out, the
fall had happened between where we were working and the shafts. But it
was worth trying, anyway. When we found the wall down, in that
section, and the rock piled up clear to the roof, I knew we were
trapped, sure.

"Thanks to what I had learned in the night-school classes, I had a
pretty good idea of the general lay-out of the mine. I knew how the
faults lay, and miners, who'd been in this mine a long time, had told
me how gassy the old workings were.

"In a lesson I'd had on mine ventilation, we'd been told that the
ventilating plant, here, had been enlarged twice over to try to keep
the mine clear of gas. It wasn't hard to figure out that, with the
ventilation stopped, gas would soon begin to collect, and that would
be the end of us.

"There was a big-enough cap on our safety lamps, as it was, and it
seemed to me that the blue cone grew longer as I looked. I told Jim
that it wasn't safe for us to hang around those old workings, we'd get
poisoned before we knew it and lose any chance we had of rescue.

"Jim didn't see it my way, at first.

"'Might as well die here as anywhere!' he said.

"I didn't like that spirit. I'd read in a book, somewhere, that if a
chap gives up hope, he dies a whole lot quicker than if he keeps up
his spirits. It was about Anton that I was worrying most. I was bent
on trying to get the youngster cheerful if I could, because he was
moping over Otto's prophecy that there was going to be an accident.
You've heard about that, I suppose?"

The reporters nodded, and Owens, who was listening, added:

"We've heard a lot about it. The old man called the turn, all right.
But maybe you don't know that he told me, too, that you'd be rescued
and that you'd come out of it, alive?"

"Did he?" queried