Fifteen minutes more and they were on the surface, making their plans; projects which entailed work from morning until night for many a day to come.

There was a track to lay, an extra skip to be lowered, that they might haul the muck and broken timbers from the cave-in to the shaft and on out to the dump.

There were stulls and mill-stakes and laggs to cut and to be taken into the shaft.

And there was good, hard work of muscle and brawn and pick and shovel, that muck might be torn away from the cave-in, and good timbers put in place, to hold the hanging wall from repeating its escapade of eighteen years before.

Harry reached for a new axe and indicated another.
"We 'll cut ties first," he announced.
And thus began the weeks of effort, weeks in which they worked with crude appliances; weeks in which they dragged the heavy stulls and other timbers into the tunnel and then lowered them down the shaft to the drift, two hundred feet below, only to follow them in their counter-balanced bucket and laboriously pile them along the sides of the drift, there to await use later on.