He started on again.  The course of the heading was far from straight, and his progress was very slow.

At last he came to a place where there had been a fall.  They had robbed the pillars till they had become too weak to support the roof, and it had tumbled in.

Ralph turned back a little, crossed the air-way and went up into the chambers, thinking to get around the area of the fall.  He went a long way up before he found an unblocked opening.  Then, striking across through the entrances, he came out again, suddenly, to a heading.  He thought it must have curved very rapidly to the right that he should find it so soon, if it were the one he had been on before.  But he followed it as best he could, stopping very often to catch a few moments of rest, finding even his light oil-can a heavy burden in his hands, trying constantly to give strength to his heart and his limbs by thoughts of the fond greeting that awaited him when once he should escape from the gloomy passages of the mine.

The heading grew to be very devious.  It wound here and there, with entrances on both sides, it crossed chambers and turned corners till the boy became so bewildered that he gave up trying to trace it.  He pushed on, however, through the openings that seemed most likely to lead outward, looking for pathways and trackways, hungering, thirsting, faint in both body and spirit, till he reached a solid wall at the side of a long, broad chamber, and there he stopped to consider which way to turn.  He struck some object at his feet.  It was a pick.  He looked up at the wall in front of him, and he saw in it the filled-up entrance through which he had made his way from the Burnham mine.

It came upon him like a blow, and he sank to the floor in sudden despair.

This was worse than anything that had happened to him since the time when he ran back to the shaft to find the carriage gone and its place filled with firebrands.  His journey had been such a mournful waste of time, of energy, and of hopeful anticipation.

But, after a little, he began to think that it was not quite so bad as it might have been after all.  He had his lamp and his oil-can, and he was in a place where the air was fit to breathe.  That was better, certainly, than to be lying on the other side of the wall with poor old Jasper.  He forced new courage into his heart, he whipped his flagging spirits into fresh activity, and resolved to try once more to find a passage to the outside world.

But he needed rest; that was apparent.  He thought that if he could lie down and be quiet and contented for fifteen or twenty minutes he would gain strength and vigor enough to sustain him through a long journey.  He arose and moved up the chamber a little way, out of the current of poisoned air that still sifted in through the crevices of his rudely built wall.