m cracking my skull
against the cross-timbers holding up the low roof.

"Before I'd gone a hundred yards, I was so mixed up that I didn't know
which way I was going or where I'd come from. It's a horrible feeling.
The dark is like a trap that you can't feel and you can't see, but you
know it's there. It's being blind with your eyes open.

"Then it was so ghastly silent, too. A blind man can always hear
something. There's life around him. Down there, not a sound! I'd lost
all hearing of the 'Tap! Tap! Tap!' I'd told Anton to make.

"All sorts of nasty things came into my head. I might step into a hole
and get crippled. I might walk straight into a pocket of gas, and,
without any safety lamp to tell me of the danger, be poisoned then and
there. The roof might be bulging down, right over my head, ready to
fall and I'd have no warning.

"I tried to reason it out that all these ideas were just imagination.
Reasoning didn't do much good. Fright got a grip of me. I was in a
cold sweat all over. My heart thumped so that it hurt. I was just
horribly scared, right through, and I had to bite my lips till they
were raw to keep from screaming.

"I'd have gone under, sure, if I'd been alone, but I had the kid to
think of, and every time the tin dinner pail banged against the wall,
it reminded me of what I'd come to look for. Anton would die of thirst
in a few hours, if I didn't find water. As for Jim, I reckoned he was
probably done for, anyway.

"I think--I'm not sure but I think so--I had a spell of running
crazily round and round in a circle, trying to get away from
something--I don't know what. It was then I gave my head a bang," he
pointed to the bandage still on his head, "and while that stunned me a
bit, it steadied me, too.

"By that time, I was lost for fair. I couldn't hear Anton's tapping. I
couldn't hear anything. I tried to turn back and got all mixed up in
the run of the galleries. I wandered this way and that, as blindly as
if I'd never been in the mine before.

"And then I heard a sound like the ticking of a big clock.

"That scared me more than anything.

"I remembered all Otto's' stories about the 'knockers,' and, though I
didn't believe them, I couldn't get them out of my head. Somebody,
something, was knocking softly underground!

"It wasn't human, that was sure!

"It couldn't be Anton, because he'd been told to tap in threes. It
couldn't be Jim, for the ticks were too close together to be the
stro