“Break!” he shouted, and everybody stopped and hunkered down to get a drink.  “Okay, Gus, let’s hear it,” he had directed.
“Well,” said Gus, “We got a shaft that nobody I’ve talked to even remembers.  It’s got a barricade made of planks that are dry-rotted, but held together with rusty nails that are actually spikes.  And the barricade was built from the inside of the shaft, not the outside.  This barricade wasn’t built by no miners.  So who built it? And they didn’t come through the mine, they came from the other end of the shaft.  So from where, then?”

Bob remembered how the men looked at each other, at the shaft opening, and then at them.  Nobody had said a word when Gus stopped talking.  His questions were sound, and nobody had an answer.  Bob could feel the hair rising on the back of his neck.  He wanted nothing more than to be out of this shaft at that moment.  He had considered going back to the surface, but could think of nothing logical to be afraid of down here.   Finally he put it to a vote, and the men chose to go on and finish the job.

That was two hours and a couple of miles ago.  Then the quake had struck.  Everybody took cover wherever they could, covering their faces and hoping desperately they weren’t getting buried alive.  Bob had never been so afraid in his entire life.  But he was still in charge, and the dust was settling.  It was time to take stock of the damage.

Cautiously he rose and looked around.  “Lamps, boys!” he barked, and counted the headlamps that shone eerily in the dust-filled cavity.  To his relief, he counted sixteen.  So far, so good.  Now they needed to get out of there.  “Injuries, anybody?”  One youngster sang out, and the first aider stepped over and mopped up a small head wound.  Everybody else was okay.  Bob chose three men to examine the walls around them for soundness, and sent Gus and two others back the way they had come to assess the damage.  They returned within fifteen minutes.  That was a bad sign.  Sure enough, Gus reported the shaft was impassable.  They would have to find another way out.

Everybody got a drink and their bearings, and continued down the shaft.  They were headed downhill, it seemed, and rounded a bend that should have pointed them south, deeper into the mountain, if Bob’s sense of direction was still holding.  Something strange happened, though, as they rounded the curve.  The air suddenly smelled…clean, and sweet, as if an opening was nearby.  Yet it was still pitch black in here.  His watch read 11:30 in the morning, and he smelled fresh air from an opening that emitted no light.  This place got stranger and stranger, he thought uneasily.  That’s when his headlamp picked out the light colored, plaited barrier just ahead.

The wall proved to be made of heavy, tightly woven netting, and reminded him of a horsehair chair his grandmother used.  It hung from top to bottom across the shaft and was secured into the rocky walls with concrete.  Bob inserted a knife into the material, and a shaft of dusty sunshine pierced the slit like a shining ray of hope.  The boys cheered involuntarily, finally giving voice to the desperation all of them had been striving to quell.  Eager hands found tools and soon the netting was dismantled, showing a brush-covered shaft entrance and blue skies beyond.  Pushing through the foliage into the bright sunshine, the boys had to squint in the brightness for a few moments.  As their vision and thoughts cleared, they gazed unbelievingly down on the scene that unfolded before them.