“Yes; but it may prove to be a long job; and I must be plain again. Every move they make seems to bring down more of the stuff from above. The water is not rising much, but the air is growing worse every hour.” “All of which means that you think we should be prepared for the worst?” “Yes; always continuing to hope for the best, of course. Are you very hungry?” “Not yet. But you must be.” “I can stand it better than the workmen. They have had nothing since they came in yesterday at ten o’clock. Very few of them carry a dinner bucket on an eight-hour shift.” “How are they enduring it?” “Each after his kind. Three of the Welshmen wanted to sing a while ago, but I wouldn’t let them. I knew it would waken you, and I thought you ought to sleep as long as you could.” “Go right away and tell them to sing all they wish to!” she commanded instantly; and a little time after he had gone and returned, a Welsh melody rose on the stagnant air, lifted by voices that were strangely deadened by the stifling closeness of the dank cavern. This was the beginning of a day of creeping horrors. Steadily, hour by hour, the vitiated air grew worse. All day long the rescuers were apparently fighting madly with the difficulties encountered in the pipe-driving attempt, but the buried ones could form no estimate of the progress made, or, indeed, if there were any progress at all. As the hours wore on, the imprisoned workmen began to react to the torturings of the foul air and the despairing situation, each after his kind, as David had said. One man, a huge-muscled Cornish miner, went stark mad and it took the united strength of all the others to conquer and tie him. Another, a north-of-England coal miner, by his burring speech, was the next to break; he was not violent, but he babbled incessantly of green fields and sunshine--of running brooks, and the fresh, keen air of the north. David Vallory tried to shield the woman he loved from as much of this as he could, and Regnier seconded him loyally. But at the last the heroic heart refused to be sheltered longer and kept away from the abyss into which the men were slipping one by one. “No; you must let me do what I can, while I can!” she cried; and then she went about among the men and talked to them, bidding them be of good cheer, and telling them that they must be men to the very end--that God was good and merciful and He would not let them suffer more than they could bear. And once she persuaded the Welshmen to sing a hymn with her, her woman’s voice rising clear above the deeper tones of the men, and never faltering even on the last heart-moving stanza: “Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes; Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies; Heaven’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee; In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.” It was then that Patrick Connolly, drill foreman and the leader in many a brutal pay-day brawl, made husky confession.