Part 18

“It wouldn’t have been you,” she said softly; “it would have been the thing we call Business; the thing that is killing all the kindliness, all the fairness, all the best there is in us.”

“No,” he denied sturdily, “I can’t let you shift the blame that way. I knew what ought to be done here; I have known it all along. If I had made a fight for it with your father, as I should have done, he would have given in.”

“I don’t know,” she said wearily. “That was what I went down to the _Athenia_ for this evening--before I met Judith. Father wouldn’t listen to me; and now----”

David knew what it was she had begun to say and could not finish; that now Eben Grillage had lost the daughter for whom, at the end of the ends, all the cost-cuttings and life-risking economies had been made. Hence, he tried again to comfort her.

“We must always give him the benefit of the doubt,” he interposed. “From what Judith told you, it is perfectly plain that the roof hasn’t fallen of its own accord at this particular time, though there isn’t much doubt but that it would have come down some time. Within the past few days a crack had opened in one side of it big enough to conceal a charge of dynamite--or a time-clock infernal machine, which was probably what was used. It was timed to go off between the shifts, and Regnier and I were the only ones they meant to catch. It was the natural inference that we would stay in the heading to see the night shift come on; Regnier always does that.”

As if the mention of his name had evoked him, the fiery little French-Canadian came up to the heading with a flickering candle-end shielded between his hands. His first inquiry was for the president’s daughter.

“Mees Virginia--you vill not been keel? Zat ees _tres bon_!”

“What did you find out, Jean?” David demanded.

“Eet ees bad--ver’ bad. They vill deeg on the other side--peek--peek--but zat loose stuff she ees come down so fast as they peek it out, _oui_. Eet ees come down on our side, _aussi_, like one damn’ hopper--pardon, M’am’selle--like one hopper full with loose stones.”

“We have no tools on this side?”

“Nossing moch. The men s’all deeg with zat what they ’ave; the peek and shovel of the mucker; but eet ees nossing.”

Since anything was better than stagnation, Virginia proposed that they go to the slide to look on, or to help, if they could. The pilgrimage was made in silence, Regnier lighting the way as best he could with his candle-end. The barrier, as the candles revealed it, was a blank slope of broken rock. Four or five men of the day shift were shoveling half-heartedly at it, and the futility of the effort was apparent at once. For every shovelful removed, two more rolled down from the filled “hopper” above. David Vallory called a halt at once on the discouraging attempt.

“Let it alone, men; it isn’t worth while,” he said. “You are only wasting your strength, and you may need it all before we get out of here.”

With the small confusion of the shoveling stopped they all fell to listening. Far away, so far that it sounded like miles instead of feet and inches, they could hear faint tappings, followed at irregular intervals by the hoarse rumble of falling detritus. David went on his knees at one side of the pit to examine the pipe of the air-line. It was bent and crushed out of shape, and there was no air coming through it, though a subdued hissing proved that the pressure was on, and that the engineer at the portal compressor-plant was still trying to force air into the blocked heading.

While he was kneeling at the pipe, David discovered another ominous threat; his knees were wet, and in the drainage ditch cut at the side of the tunnel a little pool was forming. He knew well what this meant; that death in still another form was creeping upon them. The tunnel had been a “wet” tunnel almost from the beginning, and here was a hint that the great slide might possibly prove to be a dam as well as a barrier. Fortunately, however, there was a slight up-grade in the bore, and it might be hours, or even days, before the highest point, at the working end of the bore, would overflow.

“We are not doing any good here,” he said to the young woman who stood listening with him. “We may as well go back where it is drier.”

The men had scattered as far as the limits of the cavern would permit, and Regnier surrendered his bit of candle to David to light the retreat. In the heading David made a platform of a few of the bulkhead planks and rearranged the coat-cushioned pallet.

“In a little while the close air will make you sleepy,” he told his fellow-prisoner. “When it does, you must get all the rest you can. I am afraid we are in for a long siege.”

She nodded and sat down on the plank pallet, locking her hands over her knees.

“You needn’t be afraid to say what you think--to me, David. In your own mind you are wondering which will come first: hunger, the bad air, the rising water, or the digging away of the slide. I can face what is in store for us as well as another.”

“I don’t question your courage; God knows, you proved it sufficiently by coming in here when you knew what was going to happen--for you practically did know,” he hastened to say. Then: “Some of us men will probably break long before you will. That is why I say you must rest while you can. You may be needed later on--to keep some of us from forgetting that we _are_ men.”

She gave him a tired little smile. “You are giving me a name to live up to. I wonder if I shall be able to do it--at the last?”

“I don’t doubt it for a single moment; I have never doubted it. Did you have dinner before you began on this hideous adventure?”

She nodded again. “It was a good dinner, too. Your father and mine were at the table, and Lucille and Herbert Oswald.”

“And Wishart and the Englishman?”

“No; they respected the family reunion. Your father looked years younger, and he is as brown as anything. And that reminds me; there is something I ought to tell you--before a time comes when I may not care to talk, or you to listen. It is about Lucille and Herbert.”

“Go on,” he said gently.

“I gave Herbert his hint--after you had given me leave to do as I pleased. That same evening, when I was in my bed-room lying down, Herbert came up to find Lucille. They sat together in the sitting-room of our suite, and, most naturally, they thought I had gone out. It was wicked of me to lie there and listen, but I hadn’t the heart to let them know that they were not alone.”

“Everybody knows about your heart,” David put in, striving to dispel a little of the gloom.

“Herbert said his little say very gently and tenderly, and oh, David, I wish you could have seen Lucille’s face! It was just like a beautiful rose blossoming while you looked. She didn’t say anything at first; she just put her hand up to Herbert’s face, and I could see her touching his forehead and eyes and lips with those finger-tips of hers that can see more than most of us can with our eyes. ‘I--I wanted to see if you really meant it, Herbert, or if you were only just sorry for me,’ she said, so softly that it was hardly more than a whisper; and then: ‘Oh, my dear, my dear--I am _so_ happy!’”

There was silence for a little time; then David said: “I am glad you have told me, Vinnie; it’s a tremendous comfort to me now, in the light of what may happen to us here. You see, I am taking you at your word and not trying to hide things from you.”

“Then you think it is doubtful--our getting out alive?”

“Very doubtful,” he admitted, lowering his voice so that the men might not hear. “If it were a mere matter of digging out what has already fallen in--but it isn’t, you know. The crevice has been ‘prospected’ with test holes all the way up to the surface on the mountain-side three hundred feet above us. Plegg told me that only yesterday. It is rotten all the way through, and it will probably fall in as fast as it can be dug out.”

Again there was an interval of speechlessness, and then the hushed voice of the young woman sitting with her hands locked over her knees.

“Did my father know of that prospecting?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Poor father!” she said, and her voice was shaken. “He is just simply stone blind on that side, David. I’ve tried and tried, and I can’t make him see! And now--he is going--to pay--the highest price he knows--for the dreadful cure!”

“It is time for you to forget for a while, if you can,” said David, not knowing what else to say; and he went aside with Regnier, blowing out the light of the precious candle-end to save it for a time of greater need.

A little later, when he came back and struck a match, he found her sleeping with her face hidden in the crook of an arm, and he was glad.

XXVII

The Terror

When Virginia opened her eyes, after a troubled sleep which seemed to her to have lasted only a few moments, it was with a start, and out of the depths of a nightmare in which she had dreamed that some one was smothering her.

“_David!_” she called softly; and he answered at once out of the enveloping darkness.

“I am here--sitting beside you. Have you had a good sleep?”

“It was dreadful!” she shuddered. “I dreamed that a big man like--like my father--had his hand over my face and was stifling me. What time is it?”

“It is another day. It was a little past eight o’clock when I struck a match about an hour ago. You have slept all night.”

“And you?” she inquired quickly.

“I couldn’t sleep very much--naturally. Besides, I didn’t wish to. I was afraid you might waken and call me, and I shouldn’t hear.”

“There is no news?”

“A little. Regnier reports that the digging has gone on steadily all night. He knows the Morse alphabet, and he contrived to get into communication with Plegg during the night by tapping on the crushed air-pipe; so they know on the outside that we are here and alive.”

She pressed her hands to her forehead. Though he could not see the movement, he knew she made it.

“Does your head ache?” he asked.

“Some. The air is much worse, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t any better,” he conceded. “Once, in the night, they tried shooting the slide from the other side--blasting it with dynamite, you know. That was what made Regnier try the pipe-tapping. The fumes of the dynamite were blown through the loose stuff and that made it worse for us. Now they are trying to force a large pipe through the mass of the slide to give us air and food.”

“Will they succeed?” she queried.

“I promised, last night, to talk straight to you. If the slide is made up entirely of broken rock in small pieces, as it seems to be from our side, it should be comparatively easy to drive through it. But if the mass happens to contain large bowlders----”

“Then they will drill and blast them,” she put in quickly.

“Yes; but it may prove to be a long job; and I must be plain again. Every move they make seems to bring down more of the stuff from above. The water is not rising much, but the air is growing worse every hour.”

“All of which means that you think we should be prepared for the worst?”

“Yes; always continuing to hope for the best, of course. Are you very hungry?”

“Not yet. But you must be.”

“I can stand it better than the workmen. They have had nothing since they came in yesterday at ten o’clock. Very few of them carry a dinner bucket on an eight-hour shift.”

“How are they enduring it?”

“Each after his kind. Three of the Welshmen wanted to sing a while ago, but I wouldn’t let them. I knew it would waken you, and I thought you ought to sleep as long as you could.”

“Go right away and tell them to sing all they wish to!” she commanded instantly; and a little time after he had gone and returned, a Welsh melody rose on the stagnant air, lifted by voices that were strangely deadened by the stifling closeness of the dank cavern.

This was the beginning of a day of creeping horrors. Steadily, hour by hour, the vitiated air grew worse. All day long the rescuers were apparently fighting madly with the difficulties encountered in the pipe-driving attempt, but the buried ones could form no estimate of the progress made, or, indeed, if there were any progress at all.

As the hours wore on, the imprisoned workmen began to react to the torturings of the foul air and the despairing situation, each after his kind, as David had said. One man, a huge-muscled Cornish miner, went stark mad and it took the united strength of all the others to conquer and tie him. Another, a north-of-England coal miner, by his burring speech, was the next to break; he was not violent, but he babbled incessantly of green fields and sunshine--of running brooks, and the fresh, keen air of the north.

David Vallory tried to shield the woman he loved from as much of this as he could, and Regnier seconded him loyally. But at the last the heroic heart refused to be sheltered longer and kept away from the abyss into which the men were slipping one by one.

“No; you must let me do what I can, while I can!” she cried; and then she went about among the men and talked to them, bidding them be of good cheer, and telling them that they must be men to the very end--that God was good and merciful and He would not let them suffer more than they could bear. And once she persuaded the Welshmen to sing a hymn with her, her woman’s voice rising clear above the deeper tones of the men, and never faltering even on the last heart-moving stanza:

“Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes; Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies; Heaven’s morning breaks and earth’s vain shadows flee; In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.”

It was then that Patrick Connolly, drill foreman and the leader in many a brutal pay-day brawl, made husky confession.

“’Tis your father’s blame, this, and well do we know it,” he grated. “’Twas in the back of me mind all night and all day that if we ever got out o’ this I’d take me two hands and choke him to hell, as we’re chokin’ this minut’. But ’tis all past and gone now, what wid the blessed love an’ nerve of you, little gyerl; an’ here’s hopin’ that the Gawd you believe in ’ll let you die quiet-like an’ peaceable, as I’d want my own little gyerl to go if I had wan.”

Through all this, David Vallory lived as one in hideous dream. But when the flare of another of the precious matches, a tiny flame that was scarcely visible in its brief and futile struggle with the heavy air, showed him that a second night was far advanced, he drew Virginia away to the heading and made her lie down on the coat-covered pallet, which he had remade, propping it as high as he could on the broken stone to escape the lower stratum of air.

For a long time she was silent, and when she spoke it was to ask if he were still beside her.

“Yes, Vinnie; I am here--and I shall be here when they find us.”

“You think it is all over, then?”

“I know that in a few more hours, a very few, the end must come. We can’t go on breathing this air indefinitely.”

She sat up again at that, and again he knew that she was holding her head in her hands.

“Have you ever wondered how the end would come to you, David?--how you would feel, and what you would do?”

“Not as often as I ought perhaps. There was a time last year, when I was in a caisson with Shubrick at Coulee du Sac. The bottom blew out under the air pressure, and we all thought we were gone. I don’t remember much about what I thought--only that Shubrick and I owed it to the ‘sand-hogs’ to get them into the air-lock first.”

“Once I saw a woman die,” she said, her voice thrilling with suppressed emotion. “She was horribly frightened at the last, and--and I’ve always prayed since then that when my time should come I might not go that way.”

“You won’t,” he made himself say; “there isn’t a drop of craven blood in you, Vinnie--dear.”

Again the brooding silence fell, and, as before, it was the young woman who broke it.

“If we are going to be stifled in a little while--as I suppose we are--it doesn’t matter much what we say to each other, does it, David? I mean that we needn’t consider any future, so far as we usually count futures in a conventional way?”

“No; we are only a man and a woman, naked before the God who created us, Vinnie--and we are about to die.”

“Then--David, dear--_I love you!_”

“I know it,” he returned gently; “I have known it for a night and a day,” and he took her in his arms and kissed her almost solemnly. “You are giving your life because you tried to save mine.”

She made no effort to free herself. She was weary and weak to the point of collapse, and the supporting arms were grateful and comforting.

“I had ambitions,” she murmured; “such splendid ambitions! Ever since I have been old enough to understand, I have known how dis--dishonestly much of the money was made in the contracting, and it has hurt me--oh, you don’t know how it has hurt me! Father doesn’t see; he simply can’t see. And then my ambition came. A year ago I saw how father felt toward you; first because you were Adam Vallory’s son, and afterward because you were yourself--just such a son as he would have given worlds to have for his own. I whispered to myself then that I would make you love me and marry me; and then there would be two of us to fight for honesty and fair-dealing and the--the righteousness that cares for something more than merely keeping clear of the law. You would have helped me, wouldn’t you, David?”

He bent and kissed the pulse in the throbbing temple.

“You could have made of me anything that you wished, dear. You know that.”

“I didn’t wish to make anything of you but what you were; what you had always been until father tied you hand and foot with that horrible debt of gratitude. Then he sent you out here, and I knew what would happen--what simply _must_ happen; how your gratitude to him would break you down, first in the little things, and then in the terrible ones. And that was why I persuaded him to come, and to bring me. Was it all very--unwomanly, David?”

“It was the finest thing a woman ever did for the man she loved. But you have always done the fine things.”

“Even when I made you fall in love with me when you didn’t want to?”

“I outdistanced you by many miles in that,” he said with sober gravity. “I think it went back to the kiddie days in old Middleboro.”

“In spite of Judith?”

He held her closer. “That is the one thing that I have to confess, Vinnie. I did go about a good bit with Judith, in my college years and before. We were just good chums, and I never thought for a moment----”

“Of course you didn’t! But I don’t blame Judith, either; I can’t, when I’ve done the same thing myself. But you were saying it went back to the kiddie days with--with me.”

“Yes; but I didn’t realize it until we met in Florida. I was full of hope then: I meant to make a success of myself so that I might go to your father like a man and say, ‘I want to marry your daughter.’ Then the big debt fell on me, and I couldn’t say anything while I owed your father more than I could ever hope to repay.”

“If you hadn’t died--we are both just the same as dead, aren’t we?--if you hadn’t died, you were going to pay him in the best possible way; by making ‘the apple of his eye’ deliriously happy, and by showing him the honest way out of all the little crookednesses and the big ones, too. Oh, yes; that was what was going to happen. After we were married he would have taken you into the company, and in just a little while you and I together would have been setting the pace; the good old-fashioned, honest pace. Isn’t it the pity of all pities that we had to go and die and spoil it all?--that we couldn’t have lived to make it come true, David, dear?”

“God!” he said under his breath, but for other reply there were no words.

After a time she spoke again.

“I--I think I’m going now, David. You said I’d outlast you and the men, but I shouldn’t want that. No, dear; there isn’t any pain, except in my head. I’m just--tired--and--sleepy.”

“You mustn’t give up, Vinnie!” he pleaded passionately. “We must live--both of us--to make it all come true! Listen! Isn’t that the men trying to cheer? _O my God, I thank thee!_”

A roaring blast of clean, fresh air, driven strongly enough to penetrate even to their distant retreat at the heading, fanned their faces. “The pipe!” he shouted; “they’ve got the pipe through and they’ve turned the air on. Vinnie--_Vinnie!_--we shall live, and it _shall_ come true!”

But the sudden reversal from despair to hope had been too much for the strong heart. The yielding body David was clasping in his arms had become limp and unresponsive, and the lips were silent.

XXVIII

Regeneration

The pipe of life, a four-inch steel tube which had been driven by screw-jack pressure through the mass of the slide as a result of Plegg’s inventive strugglings, soon refreshed the vitiated air in the sealed cavern. Beyond this, food, in well-wrapped paper cartridges, and hot coffee, in bottles, were passed through the tube, and the famished prisoners were able to break their long fast. That nothing within the possibilities should be lacking, Plegg ran electric wires, with an incandescent bulb attached, through the conduit, and thus the feast was lighted.

In the fast-breaking, Regnier ate with his men, but David carried his portion and Virginia’s a little apart. Though she had revived quickly in the splendid rebound of youth and health under the changed conditions, the king’s daughter ate sparingly and with eyes downcast, and was, in David’s eyes, more radiantly beautiful than she had ever been. After the keen edge of famine--David’s famine--was a little blunted, she looked up and met his glances bravely.

“We didn’t die, David, and--and you must forget,” she pleaded. “You will forget, won’t you?”

“Forget?--not if I live to be a million years old,” he avowed gravely. And after a pause: “You mustn’t be an Indian, Vinnie--to give, and then want the gift returned. I am going to talk to Plegg again in a few minutes, and you shall hear what I say to him.”

The previsioned talk with the first assistant--the four-inch pipe serving for a speaking-tube--turned out to be principally technical, to be sure. In his proper person as chief engineer, David gave directions for the pushing forward of the rescue work. The jack-screw process was to be employed again, this time to press a steel shield into the mass of loose debris, so that the rescuers might be protected as they dug. The shield could be made out of a cast-off boiler shell with the heads removed. In this manner a tunnel within the tunnel could be excavated and the prisoners released.

With so much for the technicalities, the human side of things came in for its word.

“Is Mr. Grillage with you?” David asked.

Plegg’s reply was guarded. He guessed, and guessed rightly, that Eben Grillage’s daughter was listening with David at the prison end of the speaking-tube.

“Mr. Grillage is at the hotel; he is not very well. He has had a stroke of some sort, but the Brewster doctor who is with him says it isn’t necessarily dangerous.”

“You have sent him word that we are all alive and well?”

“Sure; that was the first thing we did.”

“Good. Now listen, and carry out my orders to the letter. After you get the tunneling started here, put Altman in charge and go yourself to the telegraph office at the Inn station. I heard, day before yesterday, that President Ford of the P. S-W. was in Denver, with a number of his directors. The report was that Mr. Ford and his party were making an inspection trip over the western lines of the system. You send a telegram to Mr. Ford, asking him if he will come here for a conference with me, bringing as many of the directors as may be willing to come. Do you get that?”

“Perfectly. What else?”

“You may sign my name to the telegram, and make it as urgent as you can. This is important. Then I want you to go up to the Inn and see Mr. Grillage for yourself. Find out his condition exactly, and come back here and report.”

“All right; is that all?”