She stood for a moment completely confused, unable to make out anything. Loring leaned out into the shaft, and pulling the bell cord, signaled to have the bucket raised again. Then he took Jean’s candle, and biting off the wax from about the wick, lighted it and his own, holding them under a small protecting ledge of rock. To Jean’s unaccustomed eyes the little flickerings made small difference in the darkness. She stepped into a pool of water that lay in the middle of the drift, wetting her boots to the ankles. “Careful!” said Loring, taking her by the arm. “Keep your eyes on Burns’s candle ahead there. I will see that you don’t fall.” For a couple of hundred yards they walked on straight ahead down the drift. Jean’s eyes began to grow accustomed to the gray blackness, and now, when the roof of the tunnel grew suddenly lower, she stooped almost by instinct. “Look out for the winze, Miss!” called back Burns. “All right!” answered Loring. “This runs to the next level, a hundred feet down,” he explained, as he helped Jean to cross the plank which bridged a black chasm. She noticed the rails of a little track which ran beneath their feet, and almost as she was on the point of asking its purpose, from far ahead in the darkness came a shrill, weird whistle, and a heavy rumble. Loring caught her and held her back against the side wall as a “mucker” ran past, wheeling a heavy ore car towards the shaft and whistling as warning to clear the track. She began to feel the effects of the powder fumes in the air, and it made her head heavy and drowsy. She felt that she had come into a new, supernatural universe, where all was noisy, dark, and strange. At last the drift broadened out into a large, irregular-shaped chamber. “Esperanza stope,” said Loring to Miss Cameron. “Here is where they have struck the contact vein, where the porphyry changes to limestone.” He held his candle close to the dark wall of rock, and she could see the green crusting betokening the copper. “This will assay pretty close to ten per cent, won’t it, Burns?” asked Loring. “It ran to twelve, yesterday,” answered the foreman.