driver, who moved everybody who came and went to the mines. They had gone down without hesitation. Halfway down the smoke began to overpower them, but they went on. The probability is that they were unconscious before they reached the bottom, for only a feeble signal was given, and the engineer, not understanding, did not respond. It was only when signals did not come, and the now thoroughly frightened crowd had pleaded and then threatened the engineer that he had brought up the cage. And now they were taking them out—twelve dead men.

It was four days later when, through the combined efforts of both state and federal mine experts, a picked body of men fitted out with the most approved life-saving apparatus made their first trip into the burning mine. The hours of waiting, Dick remembered as long as he lived. The whole mining village, a motley collection of nationalities now fused into one, stood around the shaft for four hours before the first signal was given, a peremptory call to raise the cage. As it came up and the few that were allowed at the shaft saw who were in it, such a shout of exultant joy as Dick had never heard came from them, “They are alive!” “They are alive!” And certainly here were men, believed to be dead, alive, twelve of them, their pallor and wanness showing through their blackened faces, too weak to walk; yet almost unaided, they tottered out, and one after another dropped into the arms of women and children who sobbed and shouted over them.

The news quickly spread, twenty men, who had walled themselves up had been found alive after four days of waiting. They believed they would get them all out alive. The cage descended and shortly after the signal was given to raise, and eight more came up alive. Such a tremendous burst of hope and joy as it is rarely given men to see spread through the stricken crowd. If twenty were alive, might it not be that the other hundred were? But it was not to be! The draft had aroused the smoldering flames, and when the cage attempted again to descend sharp signals were soon given. This time it was only the rescue party that came up, and they were in various stages of collapse. The cry went out, “She has broken out!” “She has broken out!” The reaction on the stricken crowd, after its hours of hope and joy, was prostrating. Men and women sobbed aloud. They knew too well that the reviving fire meant that there was nothing to do but to seal the main shaft. No other way to smother the fire. White-faced, heavy-hearted men did the work; and it was not until ten days later that the experts on the ground pronounced it safe to open the mine.

Through this long fortnight of agony and waiting, Dick stayed in the settlement. From the time that he had bounded from the flat car with the relief party there had never been a moment that he had not been busy. The fact that he knew a little of everybody’s language, enough to make himself understood at least; the fact that he understood their customs, had made many of the miners open their hearts to him in a way which otherwise would have been impossible. Dick had that wonderful thing, the ability to be at home with people of any sort or of any nation. He seemed at once to the miners to be one of them in a way that not even those in authority whom they had known longest could be.

But it was not only to the people that he had made himself a helpful friend. In a hundred ways he had instinctively and unconsciously worked with Jack Mulligan, the stern young man who had bid him to jump on the flat car the morning that they had started from Sabinsport. Jack, he had found, was the son of the man who had opened the mines, a man known as “Jake,” and, as Dick was to discover, a man notorious, but beloved.

Mining had been in the blood of Jack Mulligan. If he had had his way he would have taken a pick at sixteen, and worked his way up. His mother, long dead, had extracted a promise from her devoted but riotous husband that Jack should have the best education the country would afford, if he would take it. And because it was his mother’s wish, he had taken it; but he had turned it into the way of his own tastes. He had thrown himself heartily into the work of the great technological institute to which he had been sent. He had taken all of the special training as a mining engineer that the country afforded, and he had studied the best work of foreign mines. When he had come back at twenty-four to his own home, it was the understanding that he was to be employed as a general manager, not in any way to supplant the educated but tried men that had grown up under his father, but, as he planned it, to modernize the mine.

Jack’s heart was set on making the mines safe. No serious accident had ever happened in them and to his father’s mind that was proof enough that no serious accident would ever happen, and the plans for lighting, supporting and airing that Jack brought back he treated first with contempt, then with a sort of fatherly tolerance, only yielding inch by inch as he saw how much this boy, whom he adored and in whom his pride was so great, had them at heart. Jack had finally brought his father to consent to electrify the mines completely. The whole equipment had been ordered. In a few months at least it would be in place, and now this fearful thing had happened. No wonder that day after day as he went about white and silent among the people, his heart was bitter, not against his father, but against the horrible set of circumstances that had led to the thing he had always feared and which he believed that he was going to prevent. Dick little by little got the story, and his sympathy with the boy was hardly more than he felt for the rugged, old man, who, like Jack, never left the mining settlement, but followed his son about in a beaten, dogged silent way which at times brought tears to Dick’s eyes.

The horror of the disaster brought scores of people to Sabinsport, and every day they filled the little settlement. There were the Union organizers; there was a score or more of reporters; there were investigators of all degrees of intelligence and hysteria. Among these Ralph circulated. He had bought the Argus but a few months before the disaster. His very lack of personal acquaintance with the stockholders, officers or active managers of the mine left him without any of the moderating personal feeling which a man who had long known the town might have had. Ralph saw just one thing, that the two leading stockholders in the “Emma,” the men who had always run it, were the two most unscrupulous and adroit politicians in that part of the world—the two that he had set out from the start to “get.” He felt that in the mine disaster he had, as he said, “the goods.” They, particularly Jake, were responsible for this awful thing. And never a day that he did not in the Argus publish wrathful and indignant articles, trying to arouse the community. He received no protest from his victims. Jake was so overwhelmed by the disaster itself, so absorbed in what he knew his son was going through, that the Argus was hardly a pin prick to him. It was Dick that discovered how hard it was for the old man. In that hundred men who never came back alive there had been a full score that had grown up with him, that had stood by always in the development of the “Emma.” They were the trusted men, the permanent, responsible men, who, if they had not made money, were still in Jake’s opinion his greatest asset. And then they were his friends. With these burdens on his heart, why should he mind a little thing like the Argus?

Almost immediately after the disaster, Dick found that the place was swarming with claim agents, some of whom he instinctively felt were untrustworthy. Familiar as he was with the whole theory of accident compensation, he immediately informed himself about the laws of the State. They were practically null. It was then that he went to Ralph and laid