A little further along he saw a boy’s cap lying in the way.  He picked it up and placed it in his bosom.  He brushed away a tear or two from his eyes and hastened on.  It was no time to weep over the lad’s sufferings when he expected to find his body at every step he took.  But he went a long distance and saw no other sign of the boy’s passage.  He came to a place at last where the dirt on the floor of the heading was wet.  He bent down and made careful scrutiny from side to side, but there were no foot-prints there save his own.  He had, in his haste gone too far.  He turned back with a desperate longing at his heart.  He knew that the lad must be somewhere near.

At one point, an unblocked entrance opened from the heading into the air-way at an acute angle.  He thought the boy might have turned into that, and he passed up through it and so into the chambers.  He stopped at times to call Ralph’s name, but no answer ever came.  He wandered back, finally, toward the fall, and down into the heading where the burned coat was.  After a few moments of rest, he started again, examining every inch of the ground as he went.  This time he found where Ralph had turned off into the air-way.  He traced his foot-prints up through an entrance into the chambers and there they were again lost.  But he passed on through the open places, calling as he went, and came finally to the sump near the foot of the slope.  He held his lamp high and looked out over the black surface of the water.  Not far away the roof came down to meet it.  A dreadful apprehension entered the man’s mind.  Perhaps Ralph had wandered unconsciously into this black pool and been drowned.  But that was too terrible; he would not allow himself to think of it.  He turned away, went back up the chamber, and crossed over again to the air-way.  Moving back a little to search for foot-prints, he came to an old door-way and sat clown by it to rest—­yes, and to weep.  He could no longer think of the torture the child must have endured in his wanderings through the old mine and keep the tears from his eyes.  He almost hoped that death had long ago come to the boy’s relief.

“Oh, puir lad!” he sobbed, “puir, puir lad!”

Below him, in the darkness, he heard the drip of water from the roof.  Aside from that, the place was very, very still.

Then, for a moment, his heart stopped beating and he could not move.

He had heard a voice somewhere near him saying:—­

“Good-night, Uncle Billy!  If I wake first in the mornin’, I’ll call you—­good-night!”

It was what Ralph was used to saying when he went to bed at home.  But it was not Ralph’s voice sounding through the darkness; it was only the ghost of Ralph’s voice.

In the next moment the man’s strength returned to him; he seized his lamp and leaped through the old door-way, and there at his feet lay Ralph.  The boy was living, breathing, talking.

Billy fell on his knees beside him and began to push the hair back from his damp forehead, kissing it tenderly as he did so.