"It's a queer thing he should guess so closely," commented Clem thoughtfully.
But a reporter from a Pittsburgh evening paper, who was anxious to get the survivor's story on the telegraph wires, broke in impatiently:
"What was the first thing you did, after you'd found you were trapped?"
"We got busy and made a barricade," Clem answered. "I showed Jim and Anton that, in the old workings where we were, there was a lot of gas. Our lamps showed it up, good and strong. Now, back in the rooms where Jim and I had been hewing, there wasn't any gas to speak of. We could go back there, of course, and that was what Jim wanted to do.
"But I figured out that, since the ventilation was shut off from our rooms, the gas which had accumulated in the old workings and which was steadily seeping through the coal in that section would gradually creep along the galleries our way. If that happened, we'd be down and out, before the rescuers had a chance to cut their way through. We could put up a barricade, though, and cut off the gassy part of the mine.
"Jim didn't want to work, at first. If he was going to die, he said, he might as well die of gas as of hunger. He talked a lot of rot about its being the easiest death. I was that sore, I could have kicked him.
"Anton was willing enough to work, though, and when Jim saw the two of us actually at work, he got over his grouch, went and got his pick and shovel and slaved as hard as any of us. We piled up the coal and rock, good and thick, and then scraped up all the fine dust we could find and made a thick blanket of that to keep the gas from coming through, as best we could.
"Putting up that barricade made us mighty hungry. We were working fast because the gas there was bad, and we knew the quicker we got away from it, the better for us. Being hungry didn't do us much good. There wasn't much grub.
"We had only two pails of dinner, Jim's and mine. Anton's dinner pail was out by the entry where he took the loaded cars. So we pooled the food, and divided it into three exactly equal parts, each one of us to hide his share, and to eat it as quickly or as slowly as he pleased.
"Jim ate his at once, said he'd rather have one good meal than a lot of little bites which didn't mean anything. Anton made his last longer, he still had some food left when the lamps burned out. I only took a bite or two of mine, at that time, and managed to make eight meals of it, though, of course, I couldn't tell how many hours or days apart those meals were."