“I ain’t got any family,” said a small, grizzled man.  He had a thin black band on the sleeve of his rusty, brown coat.

Several others now came forward, amid mingled expostulations and encouragement; but Keith took the first two, and they prepared to enter.  The younger man took off his silver watch, with directions to a friend to send it to his sister if he did not come back.  The older man said a few words to a bystander.  They were about a woman’s grave on the hillside.  Keith took off his watch and gave it to one of the men, with a few words scribbled on a leaf from a memorandum-book, and the next moment the three volunteers, amid a deathly silence, entered the mine.

Long before they reached the end of the ascent to the shaft they could hear the water gurgling and lapping against the sides as it whirled through the gallery below them.  As they reached the water, Keith let himself down into it.  The water took him to about his waist and was rising.

“It has not filled the drift yet,” he said, and started ahead.  He gave a halloo; but there was no sound in answer, only the reverberation of his voice.  The other men called to him to wait and talk it over.  The strangeness of the situation appalled them.  It might well have awed a strong man; but Keith waded on.  The older man plunged after him, the younger clinging to the cage for a second in a panic.  The lights were out in a moment.  Wading and plunging forward through the water, which rose in places to his neck, and feeling his way by the sides of the drift, Keith waded forward through the pitch-darkness.  He stopped at times to halloo; but there was no reply, only the strange hollow sound of his own voice as it was thrown back on him, or died almost before leaving his throat.  He had almost made up his mind that further attempt was useless and that he might as well turn back, when he thought he heard a faint sound ahead.  With another shout he plunged forward again, and the next time he called he heard a cry of joy, and he pushed ahead again, shouting to them to come to him.

Keith found most of the men huddled together on the first level, in a state of panic.  Some of them were whimpering and some were praying fervently, whilst a few were silent, in a sort of dazed bewilderment.  All who were working in that part of the mine were there, they said, except three men, Bill Bluffy and a man named Hennson and his boy, who had been cut off in the far end of the gallery and who must have been drowned immediately, they told Keith.

“They may not be,” said Keith.  “There is one point as high as this.  I shall go on and see.”