girl could see him standing there tall and broad, with the light on his boyish blond head.  He had snatched a paper from his pocket and waved it at arm’s-length so that everyone could see.  The map of the mine.  Gallery 57, on the second level, where the men now below had been working, was close to gallery 9, entered from the other shaft a quarter of a mile away.  The two galleries did not communicate, but only six feet of earth divided them.  The men might chop through to 9 and reach the other shaft and be saved.  But the men did not know it.  He explained shortly that he must get to them and tell them.  He would go to the second level and with an oxygen helmet would reach possible air before he was caught.  Quickly, with an unhesitating decision, he talked, and his buoyancy put courage in to the stricken crowd.  With that a woman’s voice lifted.

“Don’t go—­don’t ye go, darlin’,” it screamed. “’Tis no frinds down there.  ’Tis Terence O’Hara and his gang—­’tis the strike-makers.  Don’t be throwin’ away your sweet young life for thim.”

The boy laughed.  “That’s all right.  Terence has a right to his chance.”  He went on rapidly.  “I want five volunteers—­quick.  A one-man chance isn’t enough to take help.  Quick—­five.”

And twenty men pushed to the boy to follow him into hell.  Swiftly he picked five; they put on the heavy oxygen helmets; there was a deep silence as the six stepped into the cage and McLean rang the bell that signaled the engineer to let them down.  That was all.  They were the last rescuers to go down, and the cage had been drawn up empty.  That was all, the newspaper said.  The girl read it.  All!  And his father racing across the continent, to stand with the shawled women at the head of the shaft.  And she, in the far-off city, going though the motions of living.

The papers told of the crowds gathering, of the Red Cross, of the experts come to consider the situation, of the line of patient women, with shawls over their heads, waiting always, there at the first gray light, there when night fell; the girl, gasping at her window, would have given years of her life to have stood with those women.  The second day she read that they had closed the mouth of the shaft; it was considered that the one chance for life below lay in smothering the flames.  When the girl read that, a madness came on her.  The shawled women felt that same madness; if the inspectors and the company officials had insisted they could not have kept the mine closed long—­the people would have opened it by force; it was felt unendurable to seal their men below; the shaft was unsealed in twenty-four hours.  But the smoke came out, and then the watchers realized that a wall of flame was worse than a wall of planks and sand, and the shaft was closed again.