for us."

There was only one thing to do,--turn back. Fifteen minutes more and
they were on the surface, making their plans; projects which entailed
work from morning until night for many a day to come. There was a
track to lay, an extra skip to be lowered, that they might haul the
muck and broken timbers from the cave-in to the shaft and on out to the
dump. There were stulls and mill-stakes and laggs to cut and to be
taken into the shaft. And there was good, hard work of muscle and
brawn and pick and shovel, that muck might be torn away from the
cave-in, and good timbers put in place, to hold the hanging wall from
repeating its escapade of eighteen years before. Harry reached for a
new axe and indicated another.

"We 'll cut ties first," he announced.

And thus began the weeks of effort, weeks in which they worked with
crude appliances; weeks in which they dragged the heavy stulls and
other timbers into the tunnel and then lowered them down the shaft to
the drift, two hundred feet below, only to follow them in their
counter-balanced bucket and laboriously pile them along the sides of
the drift, there to await use later on. Weeks in which they worked in
mud and slime, as they shoveled out the muck and with their gad hooks
tore down loose portions of the hanging wall to form a roadbed for
their new tram. Weeks in which they cut ties, in which they crawled
from their beds even before dawn, nor returned to Mother Howard's
boarding house until long after dark; weeks in which they seemed to
lose all touch with the outside world. Their whole universe had turned
into a tunnel far beneath the surface of the earth, a drift leading to
a cave-in, which they had not yet begun to even indent with excavations.

It was a slow, galling progress, but they kept at it. Gradually the
tram line began to take shape, pieced together from old portions of the
track which still lay in the drift and supplemented by others bought
cheaply at that graveyard of miner's hopes,--the junk yard in Ohadi.
At last it was finished; the work of moving the heavy timbers became
easier now as they were shunted on to the small tram truck from which
the body had been dismantled and trundled along the rails to the
cave-in, there to be piled in readiness for their use. And finally--

A pick swung in the air, to give forth a chunky, smacking sound, as it
struck water-softened, spongy wood. The attack against the cave-in had
begun, to progress with se