al parts, each one of us to
hide his share, and to eat it as quickly or as slowly as he pleased.

"Jim ate his at once, said he'd rather have one good meal than a lot
of little bites which didn't mean anything. Anton made his last
longer, he still had some food left when the lamps burned out. I only
took a bite or two of mine, at that time, and managed to make eight
meals of it, though, of course, I couldn't tell how many hours or days
apart those meals were."

"How long did the safety-lamps burn?" asked the reporter.

"Eight hours after we were caught. They all went out within a few
minutes of each other--and we had them pretty well turned down, too. I
looked at my watch, just as the last one flickered out. It wasn't
quite a quarter past eight."

"You had no matches?" the reporter asked.

"Matches? What a fool idea!" exclaimed Clem, amazed at the reporter's
ignorance. "I should say not! Even the lamps are locked. We could
have had light three times as long, if it wasn't for that, burning
first one and then the other, but there's no way to light a lamp below
ground.

"Before the lamps went out, each of us had scraped up a pile of coal
dust to sleep on. It was plenty warm down there, and getting warmer
all the time. The lack of air made us all heavy and drowsy. We were
all asleep pretty soon after the lamps went out.

"We woke up in the dark. It was black as pitch, a blackness which
weighed on you. It hurt. One's eyes wanted to fight against it.

"How long had we been asleep? An hour, ten hours, or the whole
twenty-four? Not one of us could tell.

"But the sleep had done one good thing. It had helped Jim a lot. He
was full of pep, again. The old prospecting optimism had come back. He
was dead sure that he could find a way out. All it needed was looking
for, he thought.

"Anton wasn't awake yet, and I didn't want to wake him up. The longer
he slept, the better. I tried to reason with Jim that we'd already
gone to all the openings there could be, but he wouldn't listen to
reason. He wouldn't stay with us. He was restless. He just had to be
up and wandering.

"'How are you going to find your way back?' I asked him. 'It's easy to
get lost in the dark, and you don't know much about the mine.'

"'I'll be back with a full dinner-pail while you're sitting there
doing nothing!' he boasted, and off he started. I'd have gone with
him, quick enough, but I didn't want Anton to wake and find himself
alone.

"After a