Virginia Grillage, flying into the tunnel depths over the rock-strewn spoil-track, was mercifully spared the introductory horrors of the sudden entombment. An earthquake crash, so close behind her that she was enveloped in a shower of flakings and spallings and stifling dust, a rush of air that was like a tornado to sweep her from her feet, and she stumbled and fell and was blotted out. When she recovered consciousness there was darkness that could be felt and a silence to match it. She was lying on a pallet of coats; she knew they were coats because the sleeves of one of them were drawn over her; and some one was chafing her hands. “Is it you, David?” she asked in a voice made small and weak by the horrible stillness. “Yes; can you tell me how badly you are hurt?” She grasped his arm and sat up. “I--I think I’m not hurt at all,” she stammered. Then: “Did the roof come down?” “It did. We found you half buried in the muck. What under heaven were you doing in here?” “I came to tell you,” she said simply. “Where are the men?” “They are all down at the slide, and Regnier is with them. They are trying to find out how effectually we are buried. You are sure you’re not hurt?” “A little bruised and shaken up, of course, but that is nothing. Will the men be able to dig us out?” With any other woman he knew as the questioner, David Vallory might have temporized. But he knew Virginia Grillage’s quality and the steel-true fineness of it. “We shall not be able to dig out from this side,” he said soberly. “We are not equipped for it.” She shuddered. “This darkness is very horrible, isn’t it? And the air--it seems so close.” David did not tell her that there was the best of reasons for the closeness of the air; that the ventilating conduit, and the smaller pipe-line which supplied the air pressure for the drills, were crushed under the avalanche, leaving them in a sealed pocket in the heart of Qojogo. “You mustn’t let it grip you too hard,” he said, meaning to hearten her if he could. “By this time every camp on the line will have heard the news, and there will be no lack of help.” She groped in the darkness and found his hand. “I am not afraid, David--this is no time to be afraid. So you needn’t blink the facts for me. How wide was the bad place in the roof?” “Twenty feet or more.” “You say there are plenty of men to help; but you know, and I know, that only a few of them can work at one time in such a narrow place as the tunnel. Tell me plainly: will there be air enough to last until we starve to death? Or shall we be stifled before we have had time to starve?” “I am not admitting either contingency yet; and you mustn’t. While there is life, there is always hope. But I can’t understand why you came here. What made you think I needed to be told?”