Before becoming a freelance writer and editor, Darren Brown was the managing editor of Wilderness Adventures Press. He has edited several short-story collections, including For the Love of a Dog and Brag Dog and Other Stories: The Best of Vereen Bell. He lives in Montana, with his wife and two bird dogs.

As midnight approached, Rose was nearly a physical wreck: the perspiration dripped from every pore of his exhausted body; food he could not have eaten if he had had it. His labors thus far had given him a somewhat exaggerated estimate of his physical powers. The sensation of fainting was strange to him, but his staggering senses warned him that to faint where he was meant at once his death and burial. He could scarcely inflate his lungs with the poisonous air of the pit; his muscles quivered with increasing weakness and the warning spasmodic tremor which their unnatural strain induced; his head swam like that of a drowning person.

By midnight he had struck and passed beyond a post which he felt must be in the yard. During the last few minutes he had directed his course upward, and to relieve his cramped limbs he turned upon his back. His strength was nearly gone, the feeble stream of air which his comrade was trying, with all his might, to send to him from a distance of fifty-three feet could no longer reach him through the deadly stench. His senses reeled; he had not breath or strength enough to move backward through his narrow grave. In the agony of suffocation he dropped the dull chisel and beat his two fists against the roof of his gave with the might of despair--when, blessed boon! the crust gave way and the loosened earth showered upon his dripping face purple with agony; his famished eye caught sign of a radiant star in the blue vault above him; a flood of light and a volume of cool , delicious air poured over him. At that very instant the sentinel's cry rang out like a prophecy--"Half-past one, and all's well!"