and a spark with a gust of
smoke was sucked into the room by some eddy of the current outside. In a
last spurt of terrible effort the hole in the wall was closed and
plastered with mud and the men were sealed in their tomb.

It was but a matter of minutes before the furnace was raging outside.
The men in the room could hear it crackle and roar, and the mud in the
chinks steamed. The men daubed the chinks again and again.

As the fire roared outside, the men within the room fancied--and perhaps
it was the sheer horror of their situation that prompted their
fancy--that they could hear the screams of men and mules down the
passage toward the main bottom. After an hour, when the roar ceased,
they were in a great silence. And as the day grew old and the silence
grew deep and the immediate danger past, they began to wait. As they
waited they talked. At times they heard a roaring and a crash and they
knew that the timbers having burned away, the passages and courses were
caving in. By their watches they knew that the night was upon them. And
they sat talking nervously through the night, fearing to sleep, dreading
what each moment might bring. Lamp after lamp burned out in turn. And
still they sat and talked. Here one would drowse--there another lose
consciousness and sink to the ground, but always men were talking. The
talk never ceased. They were ashamed to talk of women while they were
facing death, so they kept upon the only other subjects that will hold
men long--God and politics. The talk droned on into morning, through the
forenoon, into the night, past midnight, with the thread taken from one
man sinking to sleep by another waking up, but it never stopped. The
water that seeped into the puddle on the floor moistened their lips as
they talked. There was no food save in two lunch buckets that had been
left in the room by fleeing miners, and thus went the first day.

The second day the Welsh tried to sing--perhaps to stop the continual
talk of the Irish. Then the Italian sang something, Casper Herdicker
sang the "Marseillaise" and the men clapped their hands, in the twilight
of the last flickering lamp that they had. After that Grant called the
roll at times and those who were awake felt of those who were asleep and
answered for them, and a second day wore into a third.

By the feeling of the stem of Grant Adams's watch as he wound it, he
judged that they had lived nearly four days in the tomb. Little Mugs
Bowman was cr