The party could not go far from the foot of the shaft, no farther, indeed, than the inside plane.  But they found nothing, no sign whatever of the missing boy.

Others went down afterward, and pushed the exploration farther, and still others.  It seemed probable that the lad, driven back by the smoke and gas, had taken refuge in some remote portion of the mine; and the portion that he would be apt to choose, they thought, would be the portion with which he had been most familiar.  They therefore extended the search mainly in that direction.

But it was night before they reached those chambers which Ralph had been accustomed to serve with cars.  They looked them over thoroughly; every entrance and every corner was scrutinized, but no trace of the imprisoned boy could be found.

Bachelor Billy had not left the place.  He had been the first to hear the report of each returning squad, but his hope for the lad’s safety had disappeared long before the sun went down.  When night came on he went up on the bank and sat under the tree on the bench; the same bench on which he had sat that day in May to listen to the story of Ralph’s temptation.  His only anxiety now was that the child’s body should be brought speedily from the foul air, so that the face might be kept as fair as possible for the mother’s sake.

Conway, who had gone down into the mine with the first searching party, had been overcome by the foul air, and had been brought out insensible and taken to his home.  But he had recovered, and was now back again at the shaft.  It seemed to him, he said, as though he was compelled to return; as though there was something to be done here that only he could do.  He was sitting on the bench now with Bachelor Billy, and they were discussing the lad’s heroic sacrifice, and wondering to what part of the mine he could have gone that the search of half a day should fail to disclose his whereabouts.

A man who had just come out from the shaft, exhausted, was assisted up the bank by two companions, and laid down on the grass near the bench, in the moonlight, to breathe the fresh air that was stirring there.

After a little, he revived, and began to tell of the search.

“It’s very strange,” he said, “where the lad could have gone.  We thought to find him in the north tier, and we went up one chamber and down the next, and looked into every entrance, but never a track of him could we get.”

He turned to Conway, who was standing by, and continued:—­

“Up at the face o’ your chamber we found a dead mule with his collar on.  The poor creature had gone there, no doubt, to find good air.  He’d climbed up on the very shelf o’ coal at the breast to get the farthest he could.  Did ye ever hear the like?”

But Conway did not answer.  A vague solution of the mystery of Ralph’s disappearance was dawning on him.  He turned suddenly to the man, and asked:—­