Black Dan took his guests to the fifteen-hundred-foot level, whence the greatest riches of the mine had been taken. He was more than usually silent as they walked from tunnel to tunnel and drift to drift. Barney Sullivan was the cicerone of the party, explaining the formation, talking learnedly of the dip of the vein, holding up his lantern to let its gleam fall on the dark bluish “breast” into which the miners drove their picks with a gasp of expelled breath. Nearly an hour had passed when Black Dan, suddenly drawing him back, whispered to him that he was going up to the eight-hundred-foot level to see Jerry, to whom he wished to give some instructions about the dinner that evening. Barney, nodding his comprehension, moved on with the guests, and Black Dan walked back to the station. As he went up in the cage he passed level after level, like the floors of a great underground building. Yellow lights gleamed through the darkness on the circular forms of west timbers, hollowed caves trickling with moisture, car tracks running into blackness. Each floor was peopled with wild, naked shapes, delving ferociously in this torrid inferno. At the eight-hundred-foot level he got off, the bell rang, and the empty cage went sliding up. The landing on to which he stepped was deserted, and he walked up one of the tunnels that branched from it, called to a pick-boy, whom he saw in the distance, that he wanted Mr. Barclay found and sent to him at once. The figure of the boy scudded away into the darkness, and Black Dan went back to the landing. It was an open space, a small, subterranean room, the lanterns fastened on its walls gilding with their luster the pools of water on the muddy floor. There were boxes used for seats standing about, and on pegs in the timbers the miners’ coats hung. Where the shaft passed down there were several square openings--larger than ordinary doorways, iron-framed and with plates of iron set into the moist ground--which gave egress to the cages. Now there was only a black void there, the long shaft stretching hundreds of feet upward and downward. Black Dan sat on a box, waiting. Afar off from some unseen tunnel he could hear the faint sound of voices. Near by, sharply clear in the stifling quiet, came the drip of water from the roof. It was still very hot, a moist, suffocating heat, regarded by the miners as cool after the fiery depths below. He pushed back his hat and wiped the sweat from his face. His eyes, as he waited, kept watch on the openings of the three tunnels that diverged from this central point.