“It looks safe,” she thought aloud.

“It’s safe enough,” returned Dunke carelessly.  “The place for cave-ins is at the head of the workings, before we get drifts timbered.”

“Are we going into any of those places?”

“I wouldn’t take you into any place that wasn’t safe, Miss Margaret.”

“Is it always so dreadfully warm down here?” she asked.

“You must remember we’re somewhere around a thousand feet in the heart of the earth.  Yes, it’s always warm.”

“I don’t see how the men stand it and work.”

“Oh, they get used to it.”

They left the car and followed a drift which took them into a region of perpetual darkness, into which the electric lights did not penetrate.  Margaret noticed that her host carried his candle with ease, holding it at an angle that gave the best light and most resistance to the air, while she on her part had much ado to keep hers from going out.  Frequently she had to stop and let the tiny flame renew its hold on the base of supplies.  So, without his knowing it, she fell behind gradually, and his explanations of stopes, drifts, air-drills, and pay-streaks fell only upon the already enlightened ears of Mrs. Collins.

The girl had been picking her way through some puddles of water that had settled on the floor, and when she looked up the lights of those ahead had disappeared.  She called to them faintly and hurried on, appalled at the thought of possibly losing them in these dreadful underground catacombs where Stygian night forever reigned.  But her very hurry delayed her, for in her haste the gust of her motion swept out the flame.  She felt her way forward along the wall, in a darkness such as she had never conceived before.  Nor could she know that by chance she was following the wrong wall.  Had she chosen the other her hand must have come to a break in it which showed that a passage at that point deflected from the drift toward the left.  Unconsciously she passed this, already frightened but resolutely repressing her fear.

“I’ll not let them know what an idiot I am.  I’ll not!  I’ll not!” she told herself.

Therefore she did not call yet, thinking she must come on them at any moment, unaware that every step was taking her farther from the gallery into which they had turned.  When at last she cried out it was too late.  The walls hemmed in her cry and flung it back tauntingly to her—­ the damp walls against which she crouched in terror of the subterranean vault in which she was buried.  She was alone with the powers of darkness, with the imprisoned spirits of the underworld that fought inarticulately against the audacity of the puny humans who dared venture here.  So her vivid imagination conceived it, terrorizing her against both will and reason.

How long she wandered, a prey to terror, calling helplessly in the blackness, she did not know.  It seemed to her that she must always wander so, a perpetual prisoner condemned to this living grave.  So that it was with a distinct shock of glad surprise she heard a voice answer faintly her calls.  Calling and listening alternately, she groped her way in the direction of the sounds, and so at last came plump against the figure of the approaching rescuer.