tent picking of steel on stone. For a
half-hour it continued, and then, slowly, Bill descended. He sat down
at the foot of the shaft, wiped the sweat from his face, thrust his
candlestick in a crevice and rolled a cigarette before he said
anything, and then only as Dick started to the foot of the ladder.

"It's no use," he said. "We're holed up all right. I picked clear
around the lower edge and there isn't a place where she isn't resting
on solid rock. Nothing but dynamite could ever move that stone. Unless
we can find some other way out we're----"

He paused and Dick added the finishing word, "Gone!"

"Exactly! No one knows we're here. No one comes to the mine. We're in
the old works which I don't suppose a man has been inside of in five
or ten years, and the map shows that it doesn't connect with the other
ones. Answer--the finish!"

Dick pulled the worn and badly drawn plans from his pocket and then
lighted his own candle, indulging in the extravagance of two that he
might study the faint and smudged penciled lines.

"Here, Bill," he said, pointing at the drawing. "These two side drifts
each end in what are now sump holes. We've got to watch out for them.
That makes it safe for us to take the main drift and see where it
leads. The two end drifts evidently ran but a few feet and were then
abandoned. So, if these plans are any good, they, too, are safe, if we
can get into them."

The elder miner peered at the plans and studied them. He stood up and
blew out his candle. He thrust his hands into his pockets.

"I've got three candles left," he said, "and I cain't just exactly say
why I put that many in unless the Lord gave me a hunch we'd need 'em.
How many you got!"

"One in my pocket, and this."

"Then we'd better move fast, eh?"

They took a desperate chance on foul air and plunged down the drift,
pausing only now and then when they came to the first side drifts to
make sure of their course. They were informed by the plans that they
had barely three hundred feet to explore, yet they had gone even
farther than that before they came to a halt, a threatening one, for
directly ahead of them the timbering had given way, the shaft caved,
and there seemed at first no opening through the debris.

"Well, this looks pretty tough!" exclaimed Bill, stooping down and
examining the face of the barrier.

His companion lighted his own candle and together they went over the
face of the obstruction.

"It looks to me as