The narrow tunnels far beneath the din of this vast city’s streets were built in the main to serve great enterprises. The steel cars that rattle on and on through the night carry coal to factories and many-floored department stores. The lighter cars, with frames of wood, transport shipments of goods from the stores to outlying districts where they are loaded on trucks and delivered. Manufactured goods are hurried away to warehouses and depots.  
Thus it happened that Johnny, entering as he did at the dead of night, found men still toiling in these narrow burrows where the light of day never comes.
 
There are many entrances to these tunnels. Most of these are elevators wide enough to lift two or three cars from the depths below to the street level above.
 
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The one chosen by Johnny that night led through a soap factory. There the air was heavy with the clean, perfumed scent of soap.
 
A man in a shabby sheepskin coat received him in silence, motioned him to a place at the corner of a loaded elevator, clanged an iron gate, and set the elevator to sinking into the earth.
 
There is something deeply depressing about being lowered beneath the natural surface of the earth. Whether it be a well, a mine, a cave or a tunnel, it is all the same. Johnny Thompson was not free from this feeling of depression. Indeed, so powerful was its influence that it was with the utmost difficulty that he resisted an impulse to go straight back to the surface. As you will see later, he was to have reason to regret resisting this impulse.
 
However, once he had accustomed his eyes to the weird green and red lights of the place, and his ears to the great din when a train passed and the vast silence w............