en the direction followed by Hugh Ritson, and was walking one pace
behind him.

In the silence the dull thud of their footsteps on the rock beneath
mingled with the drip, drip of the water overhead. When they had gone a
hundred yards down the narrow working there came another and far more
terrible sound. It was such a sound as the sea might have made if it had
rushed through a thousand crevices in the rock. It was the sound of the
thousands of tons of sand as they forced their way from the dense mass
above. And over the hiss as of the sea was the harsh crack of great
timbers splitting like matchwood.

Toward the awful scene of this tumult Hugh Ritson quickened his steps.
The man followed close at his heels. Presently their passage was blocked
with sand like a wall. Then over their heads the cross-trees cracked,
and the upright forks split and bent at the right and left of them. In
another moment the ground beneath them shook under the new weight that
lay on it. They stepped quickly back, and in an instant, with a groan
such as the sea makes when it is sucked by the ebbing tide from a cave
in a rock, the floor, with all its freight, went down a score of feet.
It had fallen to an old working that lay below.

Then the bent forks hung from the roof in empty air. Silence followed
this shock, and through the silence there came a feeble cry for help.
Hugh Ritson stepped out, plucked his candle from his hat, and held it
before his feet.

"Where are you?" he called, and his voice came back through the echoing
depths beyond. Presently a man could be dimly seen clinging to a
cross-piece in an alcove made for an air-shaft from the main working. To
get to him the treacherous ground must be crossed, with its cracking
roof, through which the sand slid even yet, and under the split timbers
that still creaked.

Hugh Ritson did not hesitate; he turned to leap down, saying, "Follow
me." But the man clung to him from behind.

"For God's sake, dunnot!" he cried. "I can not go there. It's mair nor
my life is worth!"

Hugh Ritson twisted about, and looked him steadily in the face.

"What is your name, my man?"

"Davey Braithwaite."

"Then you are the young fellow whose wife died last week?"

"Ey," with a drooping head.

"Your child died before her, did it not?"

"Ey, he did, poor laal thing!"

"Your father and mother are gone, too?"

"They're gone, for sure!"

"And you have neither kith nor kin left in all the world?"