For days there was no news; then the first fruitless descent; then men went down and brought up heavy shapes rolled in canvas and bore them to the women; and “each morning the Red Cross president, lifting the curtain of the car where he slept, would see at first light the still rows of those muffled figures waiting in the hopeless daybreak.”  Not yet had the body of the young superintendent been found; yet one might not hope because of that.  But when one afternoon the head-lines of the papers blazed with a huge “Rescued,” she could not read it, and she knew that she had hoped.

It was true.  Eighteen men had been brought up alive, and Johnny McLean was one.  Johnny McLean carried out senseless, with an arm broken, with a gash in his forehead done by a falling beam as he crawled to hail the rescuers—­but Johnny McLean alive.  He was very ill, yet the girl had not a minute’s doubt that he would get well.

And while he lay unconscious, the papers of the country rang with the story of what he had done, and his father sitting by his bed read it, through unashamed tears, but Johnny took no interest.  Breathing satisfied him pretty well for a while.  There is no need to tell over what the papers told—­how he had taken the leadership of the demoralized band; how when he found them cut off from the escape which he had planned he had set them to work building a barrier across a passage where the air was fresher; how behind this barrier they had lived for six days, by the faith and courage of Johnny McLean.  How he had kept them busy playing games, telling stories; had taught them music and put heart into them to sing glees, down in their tomb; how he had stood guard over the pitiful supply of water which dripped from the rock walls, and found ways of saving every drop and made each man take his turn; how when Tom Steele went mad and tried to break out of the barrier on the fifth day, it was McLean who fought him and kept him from the act which would have let in the black damp to kill all of them; how it was the fall in the slippery darkness of that struggle which had broken his arm.  The eighteen told the story, but by bit, as the men grew strong enough to talk, and the record rounded out, of life and reason saved by a boy who had risen out of the gray of commonplace into the red light of heroism.  The men who came out of that burial spoke afterward of McLean as of an inspired being.

At all events the strike question was settled in that week below, and Johnny McLean held the ringleaders now in the hollow of his hand.  Terence O’Hara opened his eyes and delivered a dictum two hours after he was carried home.  “Tell thim byes,” he growled in weak jerks, “that if any wan of thim says shtrike till that McLean child drops the hat, they’ll fight—­O’Hara.”

Day after day, while the country was in an uproar of enthusiasm, Johnny lay unconscious, breathing, and doing no more.  And large engineering affairs were allowed to go and rack and ruin while Henry McLean watched his son.