The ore car was rumbling away in the distance. Gregory followed the sound down the tunnel and Ora kept close at his heels. “I suppose we’ll see something after a while?” she ventured. “I can’t see even you now, only your candle.” “We’ll soon be out of this,” he said cheerfully. “You see, we’ve had to walk under the chamber from which I took that great deposit of carbonates, and then some----” He paused a moment, but not before he had turned acutely to the left. “This is where I lost the vein. We are in the fault now. How would you like to be in an earthquake that broke a vein in two and hurled one end----” His voice was lost in the rattling roar of the compressed air drills, although there was nothing to be seen until they reached another little station and faced a wider drift on the right, some twelve feet long. Candles were flaring from the miners’ candlesticks, whose long points were thrust into stulls or the softer part of the rock, and four men were manipulating two of the cumbersome air drills which stood on tripods. Gregory made a sign to the shift boss, who shut off a valve, and the din stopped abruptly. “Now,” said Gregory. “This is what you have come for.” He moved his candle along the brassy glitter of chalcopyrite in the vein, steadying her with his arm, for the floor was uneven and littered. Ora trembled. She forgot the arm about her; it felt like mere steel for that matter; she was in one of the magic caverns of her dreams and she thrilled to the magnet of the ores. “It looks like pure gold,” she whispered. “So it is in a sense, and far more beautiful to look at in the vein.” They had been standing near the opening of the drift. He guided her down toward the farther end; the miners made way for them and went out to the station nothing loath; owing their lives to what has cost many a man his life and more, the caprice of a woman. “I want to show you how the holes look before we put the sticks of powder in,” Gregory began, as he waved his candle once more aloft, this time over a less dazzling surface. He stopped abruptly. She felt his body stiffen. Then, as he whirled her about, he screamed to the men: “Get out! Run!” Ora had the sensation of being swept along by a bar of steel burrowing into the flesh of her waist. But in another instant she had lost all sense of her body. There was a shock as if something had hit the hill at its foundations, a dull roar, and then the crash of falling rock behind them.