lled? Serves them right! Why should
any of them be saved? Stuff and nonsense! Let them suffocate, the
drunken dogs!"

The workers made him no answer. First, because they could not take up
their time talking, and, secondly, because every man's mouth was
covered. The clearing of a mine is very silent work.

But in the midst of his curses Raune encountered one workman, who
placed himself in front of him and confronted him with a steady look.
This man was covered with mud and coal like the other laborers, his
face was tied up with a cloth, and only the eyes were visible; they,
too, were blackened with coal-dust, but Raune knew by their expression
that it was Ivan. No one who had ever looked into his eyes could
forget him.

Raune turned away without another word, and, in company with his
engineer, left the pit. He interfered no further with Ivan's work.

Four days and four nights the men never ceased working. They triumphed
over every obstacle and cut a pathway through every difficulty. During
those four days Ivan never for one hour left the mine. He ate his
meals sitting on a stone, and snatched an hour's sleep in some corner.

On the fourth day the workmen came upon one of the missing men. A
man--no, but a mass, flattened against the wall, of flesh and bones,
which had once been a man.

Some feet farther on there lay another body on the ground, but the
head was nowhere to be seen. They tried to get him on one of the
wheelbarrows which were for drawing coal, but he was all in fragments;
splinters and shreds of that human body were sticking to everything.

Then they came upon the charred, blackened corpses of the men who had
been burned. They were not recognizable.

Farther on there was a group of fifteen men crushed by a huge weight
of slate stratum. This could not be moved, so they were left. It was
more necessary to look after the living than the dead. Everywhere they
found corpses; still the number of the missing was not complete.

The miners employed by the company told Ivan that if any of the men
were still living they would be found at the resting-stage, where they
left their coats before they began to work and fetched them again as
they went up. In the passages, however, there had been such a total
upset that the oldest hand could not find his way. In many places the
explosion had torn down the partition wall, in other places the
entrance was stopped up with rubbish, or the roof taken off some of
the passa