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new handholds, walk again. Simple.
    Except only his right hand held, and that for just amoment. Then it, too, slipped out of its shallow niche and he fell on his back on the floor beside the dog bones.
    He lay there half stunned, wanting to scream for the unknown horseman to come back, get him out—kill him, even, as long as it was out under the sky. This wouldn’t work. He’d never—
    No.
    Sit up.
    Was this his cap, this soft thing under his hand?
    Yes. How fortunate. Everything was going to be all right. Finding his cap was a sign of that. He settled it on his head. It hurt where he’d cut himself, but the extra warmth felt good.
    He stood up. He stepped to the wall again. With his right hand, he began to feel his way along. He’d go all the way around the hole like this. He’d assess the whole surface. He’d find better handholds, make his left hand work, climb up. He had to, so he would.
    Blindly he began, and blindly he went on. The surface of the hole was fairly uniform. It had a couple of bulges—or maybe just one, he started to worry. Maybe he’d been around once already and was starting again. Hard to tell when all he could see was the little sky above and the blur of dog bones.
    A bulge again. This was at least the third time. Despair flooded him, and he dropped his forehead against the out-cropping. After all his mother had done to keep him out of the mine, he was going to die underground—
    Pebbles rained down on his back.
    â€œSsss!”
    Phin didn’t move.
    â€œPhin! You down there?”
    He knew that voice! He stepped back, looked up, and saw a round head against the blue. “Jimmy?”

4
J IMMY
    J immy sagged back, shaking his head. “‘Out the back window,’ they said, and ‘Dog Hole,’ said I. But I didn’t believe it! Mikkeleen wouldn’t fall in the Dog Hole!”
    Phin didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. The world above was real again, and fear was real, too.
    â€œHow bad you hurt?” Jimmy asked. “Can you climb a rope?”
    Phin swallowed. “I…don’t think so.”
    â€œI can’t haul you up,” Jimmy said. “It’s a dead drop.”
    â€œLadder?”
    Jimmy ignored him. “If I knot it? Could you climb a rope with knots?”
    It sounded impossible. “I think so.”
    â€œI’ll get one,” Jimmy scrambled to his feet, then leaned down again with a sardonic grin. “Don’t go anywhere!”
    Phin sagged against the wall. Jimmy. Of course. He couldn’t get himself out. Jimmy Lundy could. Wasn’t that how it had always been?
    They’d been inseparable until age seven, when Jimmy went into the breaker. Phin had waited for his own lunch pail, waited to go to work. When it didn’t happen, he asked.
    â€œI need your help here,” his mother said. It took him years to see that she was lying.
    She wanted him to read to her. Work went easier, she said, with something to think of besides coal-grimed shirts. The books were hard, but she helped him understand what the sentences meant.
    â€œWhoso would be a man must be a noncomformist.” That was from “Self Reliance,” by Emerson. Phin’s father had come to America because of this essay, and had courted his mother by reading it to her. “Whoso” meant whoever, she told him. “Would”: wants to be. “A man” was a person grown large, deep, subtle, and strong in character. “Nonconformist”: true to yourself, no matter what other people think.
    â€œAre you a man?” Phin asked his mother. She laughed, rare in those years.
    â€œYou know, Phin, I believe I am! But don’t tell anyone.”
    He could see her up to her elbows in water, listening as he read. An Irish washerwoman wasn’t supposed to read at all, let alone read Emerson. But Mary Chase was free; born that way, kept that way through her own determination.