For the fifth time Kundoo took up the pick as the Sonthal crawled back. The song had scarcely recommenced when it was broken by a yell from Kundoo that echoed down the gallery: “_Par hua! Par hua!_ We are through, we are through!” The imprisoned air in the mine shot through the opening, and the women at the far end of the gallery heard the water rush through the pillars of “Bullia’s Room” and roar against the ledge. Having fulfilled the law under which it worked, it rose no farther. The women screamed and pressed forward. “The water has come—we shall be killed! Let us go.” Kundoo crawled through the gap and found himself in a propped gallery by the simple process of hitting his head against a beam. “Do I know the pits or do I not?” chuckled Janki. “This is the Number Five; go you out slowly, giving me your names. Ho! Rahim, count your gang! Now let us go forward, each catching hold of the other as before.” They formed a line in the darkness and Janki led them—for a pit-man in a strange pit is only one degree less liable to err than an ordinary mortal underground for the first time. At last they saw a flare-lamp, and Gangs Janki, Mogul, and Rahim of Twenty-Two stumbled dazed into the glare of the draught-furnace at the bottom of Five: Janki feeling his way and the rest behind. “Water has come into Twenty-Two. God knows where are the others. I have brought these men from Tibu’s gallery in our cutting; making connection through the north side of the gallery. Take us to the cage,” said Janki Meah. * * * * * At the pit-bank of Twenty-Two some thousand people clamoured and wept and shouted. One hundred men—one thousand men—had been drowned in the cutting. They would all go to their homes to-morrow. Where were their men? Little Unda, her cloth drenched with the rain, stood at the pit-mouth, calling down the shaft for Kundoo. They had swung the cages clear of the mouth, and her only answer was the murmur of the flood in the pit’s eye two hundred and sixty feet below. “Look after that woman! She’ll chuck herself down the shaft in a minute,” shouted the Manager. But he need not have troubled; Unda was afraid of Death. She wanted Kundoo. The Assistant was watching the flood and seeing how far he could wade into it. There was a lull in the water, and the whirlpool had slackened. The mine was full, and the people at the pit-bank howled. “My faith, we shall be lucky if we have five hundred hands on the place to-morrow!” said the Manager. “There’s some chance yet of running a temporary dam across that water. Shove in anything—tubs and bullock-carts if you haven’t enough bricks. Make them work _now_ if they never worked before. Hi! you gangers, make them work.”