nd digging and prying and sweating and
talking to their "buddies," the Welsh in monosyllables and the Irish in
a confusion of tongues. The cars came jangling along the passageways
empty and went back loaded and groaning. Occasionally the piping voice
of a boy and the melancholy bray of a mule broke the deep silence of the
place.

For sound traveled slowly through the gloom, as though the torches
sapped it up and burned it out in faint, trembling light to confuse the
men who sometimes came plodding down the galleries to and from the main
bottom. At nine o'clock Grant Adams had been twice over the mine, on the
three levels and had thirty men hammering away for dear life. He sent a
car of lumber down to the mule barn, while he went to the third level to
direct the division of an air shaft into an emergency escape. On one
side of this air shaft the air came down and there was a temporary hoist
for the men on the third level and on the other side a wooden stairway
was to be built up seventy feet toward the second level.

At ten o'clock Grant came back to the second level by the hoist in the
air shaft and as he started down the low air course branching off from
the main passage and leading to the new mule barn, he smelled burning
pine; and hurrying around a corner saw that the boy who dumped the pine
boards for the mule barn had not taken the boards into the barn, nor
even entirely to the barn, but had dumped them in the passage to the
windward of the barn, under the leaky torch, and Grant could see down
the air course the ends of the boards burning brightly.

The men working in the barn could not smell the fire, for the wind that
rushed down the air course was carrying the smoke and fumes away from
them. Grant ran down the course toward the fire, which was fanned by the
rushing air, came to the lumber, which was not all afire, jumped through
the flames, slapping the little blazes on his clothes with his hat as he
came out, and ran into the barn calling to the men to help him put out
the fire. They spent two or three minutes trying to attach the hose to
the water plug there, but the hose did not fit the plug; then they tried
to turn the plug to get water in their dinner pails and found that the
plug had rusted and would not turn. While they worked the fire grew. It
was impossible to send a man back through it, so Grant sent a man
speeding around the air course, to get a wrench from the pump room, or
from some one in the mai