There was just time to act. The mob were pouring up the steps in response to Killick's final invitation. Juggernaut strode forward. "Stop!" he cried in a voice of thunder. "Stop, and listen to what Mr Walker has to tell you!" His great voice carried, and there was a moment's lull. Walker seized his opportunity. "There has been an accident at the pit," he bellowed. "Some of your lads went down after you had left, to see what damage they could do to the plant. Some of the older men went down to stop them. Something happened. The roofs of the main road and intake have fallen in, and Number Three Working is cut off--with eight men in it!" There was a stricken silence, and the wave rolled back from the steps. Presently a hoarse voice cried-- "Who are they?" Mr Walker recited six names. Four of these belonged to young bloods who had been foremost in the riot at the pit-head. There were agonised cries from women in the crowd. All four men were married. The fifth name, that of Mr Adam Wilkie, who was a bachelor and a misogynist, passed without comment. The sixth was that of a pit-boy named Hopper. Mr Walker paused. "You said eight!" cried another woman's voice in an agony of suspense. "The other two--for the love of God!" "Amos Entwistle," replied Mr Walker grimly--"and Mr Carthew." CHAPTER NINETEEN. LABORARE EST ORARE. Six men sat upon six heaps of small coal in a long rectangular cavern five feet high and six feet broad. The roof was supported by props placed at distances specified by the Board of Trade. One side of the cavern was pierced at regular intervals by narrow openings which were in reality passages; the other was a blank wall of gleaming coal. This was the "face"--that point in the seam of coal which marked the limits of progress of the ever-advancing line of picks and shovels. The men were well over two hundred fathoms--roughly a quarter of a mile--below the surface of the earth, and they had been prisoners in Number Three Working ever since an explosion of fire-damp and coal-dust had cut them off from communication with the rest of Belton Pit six hours before. The prisoners were Jim Carthew, Amos Entwistle, and Adam Wilkie, together with a hewer, a drawer, and a pit-boy, named Atkinson, Denton, and Hopper respectively. There had been two others, but they lay dead and buried beneath a tombstone twelve hundred feet high. What had happened was this. About four o'clock on that disastrous afternoon, Amos Entwistle was sitting despondently in his own kitchen. He was the oldest and most influential overman in Belton Pit, but his counsels of moderation had been swept aside by the floods of Mr Winch's oratory; and like the practical creature that he was he had returned home, to await the issue of the insurrection and establish an alibi in the event of police-court proceedings.