Softly through the silence falling--
Child, thy Father calls, 'Come home.'"

There was something in the familiar words that comforted Eleanor. She
would soon find her mother and father and Madge. But step by step
Eleanor went farther away from civilization and deeper into the woods.
At last she came out of the woods altogether to a more forbidding part
of the country. A group of small hills rose up at the edge of the
woodlands. They seemed to poor Eleanor's distorted imagination to be a
collection of strange houses.

A yawning hole gaped in the side of one of the hills. Years before a
company of promoters had believed that rich coal deposits could be
found in these Virginia hills. A coal mine had been dug in the side of
this solitary hillock. But the coal yield had not been rich enough.
Later on the company had abandoned it and the old coal mine was disused
and almost forgotten. A strange freak of destiny led Eleanor to the
spot.

She felt, rather than saw, the opening. The rain had ceased, but the
night was still dark. Eleanor believed that she had found the door of
her own home at "Forest House." Why was it so dark in the hall? Had no
one lighted the lamps? Surely, she heard some one cry out her name!

"Mother! Father!" she called. "Madge!" She put out one hand--the other
was useless--and stepped into the black hole. It was all so dark and
horrible. Eleanor took a few steps forward; a suffocating odor of coal
gas greeted her; she stumbled and fell face downward. Eleanor was
literally buried alive. She had wandered into a place that the world had
forgotten, and she was too ill to make any effort to save herself.

So it was that Eleanor Butler heard no sound and saw no sign of the
desperate search that was being made for her. But if Eleanor were
unconscious, there was some one else who knew that the woods and all the
nearby fields and countryside were being investigated, inch by inch, by
a party of determined seekers. The man believed that the search was
being made for him. For several days he had been in hiding on the edge
of the woods, not far from the old coal mine into which Eleanor had
stumbled. He had his own reasons for hiding, although he believed that
until to-night no crime had been fixed on him.

While Eleanor was groping her way out of the woods this man was crouched
in the branches of a heavily wooded tree. He had spent all his life in
the open, and knew that a party of men searching through a