"Better not. Go and send Walker to me if you can find him." Mrs Entwistle conducted Juggernaut to a sunny nook, sheltered from the keen breeze, against the brickwork of the power-house. Here sat Entwistle senior, stone-deaf, almost blind, but with his eighty-year-old wits still bright and birdlike. He was no respecter of titles or employers, this old gentleman, and in high-pitched, senile tones he criticised the arrangements for rescue. The excavatory operations were a mistake. Time was being wasted. The poor lads inside had nobbut a little water to drink and nowt to eat. The air would be getting foul, too. "You must get there _quick_, Sir John," he said, rising painfully from his seat. "See now." He began to hobble laboriously away from the vicinity of the pit-head towards the rather grimy fields which lay to the north of the colliery. By this time Walker had arrived, bringing with him a burly, bearded pit-inspector, sent down by the Board of Trade. Twenty minutes' laborious walking ended in a halt in the middle of a bleak pasture-field, from which a few unconcerned sheep were extracting some exceedingly dubious-looking nourishment. Mr Entwistle called a halt. "Been thinking things over," said he, breathing stertorously. "Known this country-side, above and below, nigh seventy year. The lads, they go buzzing round the pit-head, but the old man"--as a matter of fact he said "t'owd mon," but it will be simpler to paraphrase his utterance--"sits at home and thinks things over. They has to come to him in the end!" All this was highly irrelevant and proportionately exasperating; but old age has its privileges. Doubtless Agamemnon, Menelaus, and other eager stalwarts longed with all their hearts to tear Nestor limb from limb, what time that venerable bore delivered himself of fifty lines of autobiographical hexameters as a preliminary to coming to the point; yet they never did. Presently Mr Entwistle concluded his exordium and tapped upon the ground with his staff. "We are standing," he announced, "right over the road to Number Three. Two hundred fathom down," he added, in case they should have overlooked this point. This, at anyrate, was a statement of fact. Walker produced and consulted the pit-plan. "You are about right," he said. "Well?" "How far along this road is the face?" inquired the old gentleman. "It's a tidy number of years since I----" Walker told him, with the result that the excursion was resumed. Presently Mr Entwistle came to a halt again. "We're over Number Three now," he said. Walker again confirmed him, with the aid of a compass-bearing and the pit-plan. "Well?" he said. The old man pointed with his stick to some dismantled and abandoned pit buildings farther down the valley, a full mile away. "The old Shawcliffe Pit," he croaked. "Worked out this forty year. But I knowed it well when I were a lad." Juggernaut, suddenly seeing light, caught the old man by the arm.