Spirit lead me script and arrow on an ankle

Behind him the chalk marks ran down the wall, the ones the overman had made years back so no one would wander into the dead workings. Tonight they meant nothing to him. What he saw were the small pencilled letters someone had scratched near the floor at the junction, and under them a plain arrow pointing right, toward the old airway nobody had walked since the strike. Spirit lead me, the pencil said, in the careful hand of a lad who had been taught at the Sunday school. He had written it in a hurry, judging by how the S had slipped.

Tommy knelt, pressed his palm to the stone, and felt the faintest draught moving against his fingers. Fresh air, coming from the right. He followed it on his knees for a hundred yards, the lamp held low, until the roof lifted and a slit of grey light showed through a fall of stones where the old shaft had once breathed. He pulled himself through and lay on the wet grass, gasping like a landed fish, while the rain came down on his face.

When the rescue men came with their picks, they found the lad's pencil marks first and laughed at the spelling. Tommy never told them he had been reading the arrow as an instruction rather than a prayer. He only said, when asked, that he had known which way was out.