"There doesn't seem to be much of anything here except some starved quartz," Bill said, staring at the wall after they had gone in some thirty or forty feet, and they had come to a place where the lagging had dropped away. He caught another piece of the half-rotted timbering and jerked it loose for a better inspection. It gave with a dull crack, then, immediately after, and seeming almost an echo, there was a terrific rumble, and a report like the explosion of a huge gun back in the direction of the shaft. Their candles flickered in the air impact, and for an instant they feared that the roof was coming down on them to crush them out of all resemblance to human beings. They turned and ran toward the shaft. A few loose pebbles and pieces of rock were dripping from above like a shower of porphyry. For an instant they dared not step out, but stood inside the drift, waiting for what might happen and staring at each other with set faces exposed in the still flickering light. They had said nothing up to this time, being under too great stress to offer other than sharp exclamations. "Sounds like that shaft had given way!" the veteran exclaimed. "If it has----" He leaned forward and looked into Dick's face. "If it has," the latter took up, "we are in a bad predicament." They stood tensed and anxious until the pebbles stopped falling and a silence like that of a tomb, so profound as to seem thick and dense, invaded the hollows; then Dick started out into the shaft. He felt a restraining hand on his arm. "Wait a minute, boy," the elder man said. "You're the owner here. It's dangerous. I ought to be the one to go first and find out what's happened. You wait inside the drift." But Dick shook his hand off and stepped out to look upward. A dense blackness filled what should have been a space of light. This he had partially expected from the fact that when they came out toward the shaft there had been no sign of day; but he had not anticipated such a complete closing of the opening. "Lord! We're buried in!" came an exclamation from behind him, and he felt a sudden sinking of the heart. "I'll go easily till I come to it," he said, his voice sounding strained and loud although he had spoken scarcely above a whisper. "You stand clear so that if anything gives, Bill, you won't be caught." The elder miner would have protested, but already he was slowly and cautiously climbing the ladder. Step by step he ascended, holding the light above his head to discover the place where the shaft had given way, and then Bill, standing anxiously below, heard a harsh shout. "I think the ladder will bear your weight as well as mine. Come up here." The big man climbed steadily upward until he stood directly beneath the younger man's feet. He ventured an exclamation that was almost an oath. "Not the shaft at all," he said, an instant later. "It's just a bowlder so big that it filled the whole opening. We're plugged and penned in here like rats in a trap!"