Back in the rear of the boiler, he examined the single huge bolt that held him captive. It would take forty minutes to shear off its head with his chisel if the tool would stay sharp. He straightened his back and began hammering, stopping every twenty blows to examine the slowly growing cut between the bolt head and the manhole plate. In only a few minutes he was dripping with sweat and his heart was bouncing like an unbalanced tire. He crawled over to the safety valve and gulped breaths of air directly from the opening, feeding his heart, making it idle down.

It was during this break that he first thought about dying. He imagined his cement grave covering in the bright cemetery next to the railroad track, and he saw his parents on their porch, alone for the rest of their lives. He closed his eyes again and imagined the volumes of air moving around the working space of LeBlanc’s Machine Shop. He wondered if in the next life he would be a machinist. His heart misfired once, and he said an Act of Contrition on his knees.

Then from below came the sound of water running, soon accompanied by a gurgling like that of a commode flushing, and Paul sprang to all fours like a surprised cat. Someone had turned on the pumps and was filling the boiler. He turned off his light, as though darkness would accelerate his thinking. Numbers ran through his head as he remembered the size of the feed pumps and estimated the time it would take to drown him. He fished around in his belt and grabbed a thick, short chisel and shuffled to the rear of the boiler, hammering the tool against a flue where it entered the rear tube sheet. After a few blows, it penetrated, and with more strikes he had opened up a two-inch hole through which the water would pass out of the chamber. For once in his life, he was grateful for weak flues, and he set about cutting through the entire top row. When he finished, he was ready to pass out from lack of oxygen, so he dragged himself to the front of the boiler to breathe directly through the punched-out nipples. His mouth filled with scale, and he fell back coughing, gasping like a dying fish.