We sit at the ends of the earth and sew on buttons and play cards while fate wipes from existence the thing dearest to us.  Johnny’s father that afternoon mounted his new saddle-horse and rode through the afternoon lights and shadows of spring.  The girl, who had not forgotten, either, went to a luncheon and the theatre after.  And it was not till next morning that Brant, her brother, called to her, as she went upstairs after breakfast, in a voice which brought her running back.  He had a paper in his hand, and he held it to her.

“What is it, Brant?  Something bad?”

“Yes,” he said, breathing fast.  “Awful.  It’s going to make you feel badly, for you liked him—­poor old Johnny McLean.”

“Johnny McLean?” she repeated.  Brant went on.

“Yesterday—­a mine accident.  He went down after the entombed men.  Not a chance.”  Brant’s mouth worked.  “He died—­like a hero—­ you know.”  The girl stared.

“Died?  Is Johnny McLean dead?”

She did fall down, or cry out, but then Brant knew.  Swiftly he came up and put his big, brotherly arm around her.

“Wait, my dear,” he said.  “There’s a ray of hope.  Not really hope, you know—­it was certain death he went to—­but yet they haven’t found—­they don’t know, absolutely, that he’s dead.”

Five minutes later the girl was locked in her room with the paper.  His name was in large letters in the head-lines.  She read the account over many times, with painstaking effort to understand that this meant Johnny McLean.  That he was down there now, while she breathed pure air.  Many times she read it, dazed.  Suddenly she flashed to the window and threw it open and beat on the stone sill and dragged her hands across it.  Then in a turn she felt this to be worse than useless and dropped on her knees and found out what prayer is.  She read the paper again, then, and faced things.

It was the oft-repeated, incredible story of men so accustomed to danger that they throw away their lives in sheer carelessness.  A fire down in the third level, five hundred feet underground; delay in putting it out; shifting of responsibility of one to another, mistakes and stupidity; then the sudden discovering that they were all but cut off; the panic and the crowding for the shaft, and scenes of terror and selfishness and heroism down in the darkness and smothering smoke.

The newspaper story told how McLean, the young superintendent, had come running down the street, bare-headed, with his light, great pace of an athlete.  How, just as he got there, the cage of six men, which had gone to the third level, had been drawn up after vague, wild signalling, filled with six corpses.  How, when the crowd had seen that he meant to go down, a storm of appeal had broken that he should not throw his life away; how the very women whose husbands and sons were below had clung to him.  Then the paper told of how he had turned at the mouth of the shaft—­the