"It got them convicts...." The story stopped, as they picked their way carefully around two uniformed internes desperately applying a pulmotor to a body flat on old sacking. There was another body behind, and four tall, tired negroes drooped on their feet, waiting to be sent again into the stifling danger. "Everybody in six ... maybe eight. I counted eighteen." He took a moment off to scream commands at a foreman, who nodded humbly, and led his men back into the opened mountain intestine called entry six. "Eight is choked up with rocks. They wasn't many in eight. Niggers, maybe." "They're digging in?" "They got into six. Working on eight--the whole mountain's caved down." "What did it?" "Overcharge--damn' carelessness--God knows. At this time of all others--the damn' fools! I told them men that roofin' was cracked--an' then they overcharge! The damn'----" "Shall I take eight?" "I've got Gahey there. See the clerk at the bottom; he's got the dope. Wire the State Mining Commission. We've notified the hospitals and the Red Cross. I've sent for the Birrell-Florence rescue corps; dunno what good it'll do. See Dockery; he's day clerk." Hewin shoved him on, and stumbled aside. The air was clearer in the corrugated iron building at the bottom. The lights were lit, and their sallow glimmer equalled the dimness without. Pelham went at the job quickly--Dockery, cool and collected, spread the facts before him. He followed on the ramp map; Dockery explained lucidly. "In this workway there were thirteen men, Mr. Judson; ten negroes here; and here, and here ... I figure about twenty-five killed, unless some are alive in eight." The human magnitude of the thing focussed within him. He gripped himself tightly, and sent off a preliminary wire to the mining commission. It was after two when he got away from the office, to direct the temporary care of the bodies which had been carried to the storehouse in the nearer edge of Hewintown. He saw Jane Lauderdale at the other end of the long drab room, busily directing the emergency workers the United Charities had sent. Deaf to the questions of the company doctor at his side, he stood for a long moment. Jane put her arms under the shoulders of a broken old negress--mother or wife--clinging to one still body on a blanket-covered packing case, and handed her tenderly to another of the girls. He caught one full glance at the woman's face, ravaged with a life's hard unhappiness, printed now with this vaster dumb suffering. The sharp clear brilliance of Southern sunshine drove in parallel golden bars from a western window. Outside, the gay blue of early summer, the beauty and joy; within, this man-made house of death. Jane did not see him. He returned to the grim task of providing for what new bodies were borne into the temporary morgue. He could not find time to think; here was all that he could do. XIII