disturbance in the moon. The look of displeasure on Rutledge’s face deepened as I caught hold of one of the ropes and swung myself lightly into the cage, following father and Joe. Delaying the signal for descent, Rutledge said:

“While it may be safe enough down there, it isn’t exactly like a lady’s parlor, Gordon—not to-day, anyway.”

“Oh, Leslie is just going down on an errand,” father explained. “But, Leslie, perhaps you had better wait here and let me send the spade up to you.”

“And make you walk from your tunnel clear back to the hoisting cage again!” I remonstrated. “Why, Mr. Rutledge, I’ve been down lots of times, you know, and I’m not at all afraid.”

The superintendent had looked relieved when he heard that my stay in the mine was likely to be a short one. I wondered, inconsequently, as the cage started on its downward passage, if he had thought that I was going down on a tour of inspection. There would have been nothing for him to fear from any one’s inspection; he was a good superintendent. “Don’t stay long, Miss Leslie,” he called down after us. I could no longer see his face, but his voice sounded anxious, and father remarked:

“Rutledge seems quite uneasy, somehow.”

“Dese yer minin’ bosses, dey knows dey business,” muttered old Joe. “Dey knows dat de rheumatiz hit lays in wait, like a wile beas’ scentin’ hits prey. ’Spect’s Mas’r Rutledge he hate fur ter see a spry young gal like Miss Leslie git all crippled up, same’s a ole lame nigger.”

“Yes; it must be that he feared Leslie would get the rheumatism,” father said, in a lighter tone. Old Joe’s explanations and reasons for things were always a source of unfailing delight to him. The cage reached the bottom of the shaft and we stepped out. By the light that was always burning at the tunnel’s mouth father and Joe each selected a miner’s lamp from the stock in a corner, and, as father was lighting his, he said: “You had better carry a lamp, too, Leslie.” I picked one up while father slipped the bar of his under his cap band. Then he glanced at my big hat. “You’ll have to carry yours in your hand, child; there’s no room for so small a thing as a miner’s lamp on that great island of straw that you call a shade hat.”

The Gray Eagle was a quartz gold mine. Tunnels drifted this way and that, wherever deposits of the elusive metal led them; sometimes they even made turns so sharp as to almost double back on themselves. I was glad to see that the point where father and Joe halted, at last, to pick up the tools that they had thrown down when they quit work in the mine, was within sight of the twinkling yellow star that marked the location of the hoisting cage. The place seemed less eerie somehow, with this means of escape signaled in the darkness. I had been, as I told Mr. Rutledge, in the mines a good many times, but never had its darkness seemed so impenetrable, so encroaching, as on this morning.

“It seems to me that our lamps don’t give so much light as usual, or else what they do give does not go so far,” I remarked to father as I lingered beside him a few moments, watching him work.

He was using a drill on the face of the rock wall in front of him. He suspended operations now to say: “I noticed that myself. The air is thick and damp; the light is lost much as it is in a fog.” Then he called my attention to an object lying on the ground at his feet. “There’s the spade; I guess you’d better be going back with it, dear; Reynolds will be needing it.”

Accordingly, with the spade in one hand and the lamp in the other, I started to retrace my steps to the hoisting cage. The sound of the drill that father was now plying vigorously followed me, becoming muffled, rather than fainter in the distance as I proceeded. From the various tunnels, branching off to the right and left, came the sound of other drills, and, occasionally, the plaintive “hee-haw” of one of the half-dozen or more little Andalusian mules used in hauling the loaded cars to and from the ore dumps near the hoisting cage. With all these sounds I was more or less familiar, but to-day, underneath them all, it seemed to me that there were others, myriads of them. To my lively young fancy the silence teemed with mysterious noises; low groans and sighing whispers that wandered bodiless through dark tunnels, dripping with a soft, unusual ooze. Knowing that Reynolds was in a hurry for the spade I hastened along, listening and speculating, until coming opposite one of the side extensions I was suddenly taken with the whim to see if its walls were as damp as those of the tunnel that I was then standing in. I turned into it accordingly, but stopped doubtfully after a few yards. Holding the lamp aloft I looked inquiringly along the walls. Damp! I understood now why my father wore a coat, a circumstance that had already impressed itself upon my mind as being very unusual among these underground workers. The water was almost running down the sides of the rocky tunnel, and the light of my lamp was reflected back at me in a thousand sliding, mischievous drops.

“Where does it all come from?” I thought, laying my hand on the face of the rock before which I stood. My hand had touched it for a single heart-beat, no more, when I felt the color go out of my face, leaving me with wide, staring eyes, while I stood trembling and ghastly white in the breathless gloom. Like one suddenly bereft of all power of speech or motion I stared mutely at the black wall before me. I had felt the rock move!

Standing there in that awful darkness, hundreds of feet underground, I understood what had happened, what was happening, and, dumb with the horror of that awful knowledge, stood motionless. All the stories that I had ever heard or read of sudden irruptions of water in mines, of dreadful cavings-in, flashed into my mind, and then, breaking the paralyzing trance of terror, I turned and ran toward the main tunnel. I tried to utter a warning shout as I ran, but my stiffened lips gave forth no sound. Happily, as I reached the main tunnel, the light at the foot of the shaft was in direct range with my vision, and between the shaft and myself I plainly saw a man hastening toward it. He was wearing a light gray coat. A quick glance toward the spot where I had left father and Joe showed nothing but darkness. They had both left. The hoisting cage was down, and, as I raced toward it, the man in the gray coat scrambled in. Even in my terror and excitement I was conscious of an unreasonable, desolate sense of desertion when I saw that. Yet, underneath it all a lingering fragment of common sense told me that father would believe me, by this, safe above; he had told me to go—and I had not obeyed him.

Behind me, as I ran, arose a shrill and terrible chorus, a crashing of timbers, yells and shrieks of men, the terrific braying of the Andalusian mules, and above all, a new sound; the mighty voice, the swelling roar of imprisoned waters taking possession of the channels that man had inadvertently prepared for them. I reached the hoisting cage so nearly too late that it had already started on its upward journey, when, seeing me, one of its occupants reached down, caught both my upstretched hands and swung me up to a place by his side. It chanced, providentially, that the cage was at the bottom of the shaft when the inrush of waters came, and it had been held there for a brief, dangerous moment while the men nearest the shaft fled to its protection. It rose slowly upward, not too