nine o'clock
The cars came jangling along the passageways empty and went back loaded and groaning . Occasionally the piping voice of a boy and the melancholy bray of a mule broke the deep silence of the place . For sound traveled slowly through the gloom , as though the torches sapped it up and burned it out in faint , trembling light to confuse the men who sometimes came plodding down the galleries to and from the main bottom . At nine o'clock Grant Adams had been twice over the mine , on the three levels and had thirty men hammering away for dear life . He sent a car of lumber down to the mule barn , while he went to the third level to direct the division of an air shaft into an emergency escape . On one side of this air shaft the air came down and there was a temporary hoist for the men on the third level and on the other side a wooden stairway was to be built up seventy feet toward the second level . At ten o'clock Grant came back to the second level by the hoist in the air shaft and as he started down the low air course branching off from the main passage and leading to the new mule barn , he smelled burning pine ; and hurrying around a corner saw that the boy who dumped the pine boards for the mule barn had not taken the boards into the barn , nor even entirely to the barn , but had dumped them in the passage to the windward of the barn , under the leaky torch , and Grant could see down the air course the ends of the boards burning brightly .