Clem, in amazement.

"Point-blank. It's a good thing for you he did, too, for a whole lot
of first-class men volunteered for the rescue work who couldn't have
been persuaded to enter the mine again, otherwise. The old man stuck
to his belief, even after most of us thought you would be dead. The
geophone expert backed him up, by saying he heard tapping, but it was
Otto's persistence that did the most."

"It's a queer thing he should guess so closely," commented Clem
thoughtfully.

But a reporter from a Pittsburgh evening paper, who was anxious to get
the survivor's story on the telegraph wires, broke in impatiently:

"What was the first thing you did, after you'd found you were
trapped?"

"We got busy and made a barricade," Clem answered. "I showed Jim and
Anton that, in the old workings where we were, there was a lot of gas.
Our lamps showed it up, good and strong. Now, back in the rooms where
Jim and I had been hewing, there wasn't any gas to speak of. We could
go back there, of course, and that was what Jim wanted to do.

"But I figured out that, since the ventilation was shut off from our
rooms, the gas which had accumulated in the old workings and which was
steadily seeping through the coal in that section would gradually
creep along the galleries our way. If that happened, we'd be down and
out, before the rescuers had a chance to cut their way through. We
could put up a barricade, though, and cut off the gassy part of the
mine.

"Jim didn't want to work, at first. If he was going to die, he said,
he might as well die of gas as of hunger. He talked a lot of rot about
its being the easiest death. I was that sore, I could have kicked him.

"Anton was willing enough to work, though, and when Jim saw the two of
us actually at work, he got over his grouch, went and got his pick and
shovel and slaved as hard as any of us. We piled up the coal and rock,
good and thick, and then scraped up all the fine dust we could find
and made a thick blanket of that to keep the gas from coming through,
as best we could.

"Putting up that barricade made us mighty hungry. We were working fast
because the gas there was bad, and we knew the quicker we got away
from it, the better for us. Being hungry didn't do us much good.
There wasn't much grub.

"We had only two pails of dinner, Jim's and mine. Anton's dinner pail
was out by the entry where he took the loaded cars. So we pooled the
food, and divided it into three exactly equ