Bell pressed himself tight against the cold steel to minimize the distance his body would travel at the moment of impact. It could not be much farther to the coal seam at the bottom. Suddenly, the train jumped the tracks. Metal shrieked as it battered the side of the tunnel and threatened to buck him off like a maddened bronco. Instead, it saved the young detective’s life. Sideswiping the walls had the effect of slowing the train. When it finally struck the seam with a thunderclap, he was banged hard against the back of the car, but not so hard as to break bones.

The silence that followed was as deep as the darkness.

Bell leaped down and ran in the dark, back up the route the runaway had taken him, sliding his boots along the crossties to stay in the middle of the track, where he was least likely to smash into anything. He ran as fast as he could with his hands stretched ahead of his face in hopes of feeling an obstruction in time to stop.

He had seconds to get out before he died in the black and airless chaos of the wrecked gallery. For dangers far deadlier than collision lurked in the dark. Damps—poisonous carbonic acid and explosive methane—were collecting quickly as the demolished ventilator ceased to draw fresh air from the surface and expel lethal vapors. Suffocating blackdamp, thick with carbonic acid, would kill him in ten seconds. Fulminating damp, “inflammable air,” marsh gas exuded by the coal, would blow everyone in the mine to Kingdom Come. Thank God, he thought, most of the day shift was out of the mine and the night shift hadn’t entered yet. Only the doorboys were still at their posts.

All of a sudden, the dark lifted. Daylight so soon? But it wasn’t possible. He could not be that close to the mouth. Then he realized that the light was coming from behind him—orange flickering light—the sparkle of fire as gas and coal at the face of the seam ignited. The sudden light saved him from stumbling over a doorboy crawling along the tracks.

Bell yanked him to his feet.

“Stand up! Chokedamp suffocates you down low. Run!”

He shoved the boy ahead of him, and together they ran from the flames and smoke chasing them up the slope. The smoke would spread white damp, odorless carbon monoxide, which would kill them in minutes if they didn’t burn to death first.

They stopped abruptly. The haulageway was blocked. The train had sheared off the pillars of coal that the miners had left standing to brace the ceiling. Unsupported, the ceiling had fallen into the haulageway. A two-foot opening was held up by a single groaning timber.

“I can fit through, mister. I’ll get help.”

“Hold on,” said Bell. It looked like it would collapse any moment. He crawled into the narrow space, braced the groaning timber with his back, and tried to hold the mountain. “O.K., sonny,” he gasped. “Slip by.”