Thank you for that lovely comment, @samsmith1971! I aimed to see if I could create and maintain suspense from beginning to end. It's not the type of writing I usually go for, but I thought it would be a fun challenge. One of my favorite things about writing, which is also the most unnerving, is that I often don't know where a story is going to go when I start it. I had no idea the miner was going to be under the house... and then that was how the words came out. Ha ha.