Suddenly
she flashed to the window and threw it open and beat on the stone
sill and dragged her hands across it. Then in a turn she felt
this to be worse than useless and dropped on her knees and found
out what prayer is. She read the paper again, then, and faced
things.
It was the oft-repeated, incredible story of men so accustomed to
danger that they throw away their lives in sheer carelessness.
A fire down in the third level, five hundred feet underground;
delay in putting it out; shifting of responsibility of one to
another, mistakes and stupidity; then the sudden discovering
that they were all but cut off; the panic and the crowding for
the shaft, and scenes of terror and selfishness and heroism
down in the darkness and smothering smoke.
The newspaper story told how McLean, the young superintendent,
had come running down the street, bare-headed, with his light,
great pace of an athlete. How, just as he got there, the cage
of six men, which had gone to the third level, had been drawn
up after vague, wild signalling, filled with six corpses.
How, when the crowd had seen that he meant to go down, a storm
of appeal had broken that he should not throw his life away;
how the very women whose husbands and sons were below had clung
to him.
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