"How long did the safety-lamps burn?" asked the reporter.
"Eight hours after we were caught. They all went out within a few minutes of each other—and we had them pretty well turned down, too. I looked at my watch, just as the last one flickered out. It wasn't quite a quarter past eight."
"You had no matches?" the reporter asked.
"Matches? What a fool idea!" exclaimed Clem, amazed at the reporter's ignorance. "I should say not! Even the lamps are locked. We could have had light three times as long, if it wasn't for that, burning first one and then the other, but there's no way to light a lamp below ground.
"Before the lamps went out, each of us had scraped up a pile of coal dust to sleep on. It was plenty warm down there, and getting warmer all the time. The lack of air made us all heavy and drowsy. We were all asleep pretty soon after the lamps went out.
"We woke up in the dark. It was black as pitch, a blackness which weighed on you. It hurt. One's eyes wanted to fight against it.
"How long had we been asleep? An hour, ten hours, or the whole twenty-four? Not one of us could tell.
"But the sleep had done one good thing. It had helped Jim a lot. He was full of pep, again. The old prospecting optimism had come back. He was dead sure that he could find a way out. All it needed was looking for, he thought.
"Anton wasn't awake yet, and I didn't want to wake him up. The longer he slept, the better. I tried to reason with Jim that we'd already gone to all the openings there could be, but he wouldn't listen to reason. He wouldn't stay with us. He was restless. He just had to be up and wandering.
"'How are you going to find your way back?' I asked him. 'It's easy to get lost in the dark, and you don't know much about the mine.'