Dick took his little prospecting hammer and tapped the bowlder, at first gently, then with firmer strokes, and looked down at his partner with a distressed face. "Hear that?" he exclaimed, rather than questioned. "It's a big one, and solid. It sounds bad to me." For a minute they waved their candles round the edge, inspecting the resting place of the rock that had imprisoned them. Everywhere it was set firmly. A fitted door could have been no more secure. They consulted, and at last Bill descended and stepped back into the entrance to the drift to avoid falling stone, while the younger man attacked the edge beneath the bowlder, inch by inch, trying to find some place where he could pick through to daylight. At last, his arm wearied and the point of his prospecting hammer dulled, he rested. "Come down, Dick, and I'll take a spell," Bill called up from below, and he obeyed. The big miner, without comment, climbed up, and again the vault-like space was filled with the persistent picking of steel on stone. For a half-hour it continued, and then, slowly, Bill descended. He sat down at the foot of the shaft, wiped the sweat from his face, thrust his candlestick in a crevice and rolled a cigarette before he said anything, and then only as Dick started to the foot of the ladder. "It's no use," he said. "We're holed up all right. I picked clear around the lower edge and there isn't a place where she isn't resting on solid rock. Nothing but dynamite could ever move that stone. Unless we can find some other way out we're----" He paused and Dick added the finishing word, "Gone!" "Exactly! No one knows we're here. No one comes to the mine. We're in the old works which I don't suppose a man has been inside of in five or ten years, and the map shows that it doesn't connect with the other ones. Answer--the finish!" Dick pulled the worn and badly drawn plans from his pocket and then lighted his own candle, indulging in the extravagance of two that he might study the faint and smudged penciled lines. "Here, Bill," he said, pointing at the drawing. "These two side drifts each end in what are now sump holes. We've got to watch out for them. That makes it safe for us to take the main drift and see where it leads. The two end drifts evidently ran but a few feet and were then abandoned. So, if these plans are any good, they, too, are safe, if we can get into them." The elder miner peered at the plans and studied them. He stood up and blew out his candle. He thrust his hands into his pockets. "I've got three candles left," he said, "and I cain't just exactly say why I put that many in unless the Lord gave me a hunch we'd need 'em. How many you got!" "One in my pocket, and this." "Then we'd better move fast, eh?"