Two Wyoming Girls and Their Homestead Claim Part 2

"And make you walk from your tunnel clear back to the hoisting cage again!" I remonstrated. "Why, Mr. Rutledge, I've been down lots of times, you know, and I'm not at all afraid."

The superintendent had looked relieved when he heard that my stay in the mine was likely to be a short one. I wondered, inconsequently, as the cage started on its downward pa.s.sage, if he had thought that I was going down on a tour of inspection. There would have been nothing for him to fear from any one's inspection; he was a good superintendent.

"Don't stay long, Miss Leslie," he called down after us. I could no longer see his face, but his voice sounded anxious, and father remarked:

"Rutledge seems quite uneasy, somehow."

"Dese yer minin' bosses, dey knows dey business," muttered old Joe.

"Dey knows dat de rheumatiz hit lays in wait, like a wile beas'

scentin' hits prey. 'Spect's Mas'r Rutledge he hate fur ter see a spry young gal like Miss Leslie git all crippled up, same's a ole lame n.i.g.g.e.r."

"Yes; it must be that he feared Leslie would get the rheumatism,"

father said, in a lighter tone. Old Joe's explanations and reasons for things were always a source of unfailing delight to him. The cage reached the bottom of the shaft and we stepped out. By the light that was always burning at the tunnel's mouth father and Joe each selected a miner's lamp from the stock in a corner, and, as father was lighting his, he said: "You had better carry a lamp, too, Leslie." I picked one up while father slipped the bar of his under his cap band. Then he glanced at my big hat. "You'll have to carry yours in your hand, child; there's no room for so small a thing as a miner's lamp on that great island of straw that you call a shade hat."

The Gray Eagle was a quartz gold mine. Tunnels drifted this way and that, wherever deposits of the elusive metal led them; sometimes they even made turns so sharp as to almost double back on themselves. I was glad to see that the point where father and Joe halted, at last, to pick up the tools that they had thrown down when they quit work in the mine, was within sight of the twinkling yellow star that marked the location of the hoisting cage. The place seemed less eerie somehow, with this means of escape signaled in the darkness. I had been, as I told Mr. Rutledge, in the mines a good many times, but never had its darkness seemed so impenetrable, so encroaching, as on this morning.

"It seems to me that our lamps don't give so much light as usual, or else what they do give does not go so far," I remarked to father as I lingered beside him a few moments, watching him work.

He was using a drill on the face of the rock wall in front of him. He suspended operations now to say: "I noticed that myself. The air is thick and damp; the light is lost much as it is in a fog." Then he called my attention to an object lying on the ground at his feet.

"There's the spade; I guess you'd better be going back with it, dear; Reynolds will be needing it."

Accordingly, with the spade in one hand and the lamp in the other, I started to retrace my steps to the hoisting cage. The sound of the drill that father was now plying vigorously followed me, becoming m.u.f.fled, rather than fainter in the distance as I proceeded. From the various tunnels, branching off to the right and left, came the sound of other drills, and, occasionally, the plaintive "hee-haw" of one of the half-dozen or more little Andalusian mules used in hauling the loaded cars to and from the ore dumps near the hoisting cage. With all these sounds I was more or less familiar, but to-day, underneath them all, it seemed to me that there were others, myriads of them. To my lively young fancy the silence teemed with mysterious noises; low groans and sighing whispers that wandered bodiless through dark tunnels, dripping with a soft, unusual ooze. Knowing that Reynolds was in a hurry for the spade I hastened along, listening and speculating, until coming opposite one of the side extensions I was suddenly taken with the whim to see if its walls were as damp as those of the tunnel that I was then standing in. I turned into it accordingly, but stopped doubtfully after a few yards. Holding the lamp aloft I looked inquiringly along the walls. Damp! I understood now why my father wore a coat, a circ.u.mstance that had already impressed itself upon my mind as being very unusual among these underground workers. The water was almost running down the sides of the rocky tunnel, and the light of my lamp was reflected back at me in a thousand sliding, mischievous drops.

"Where does it all come from?" I thought, laying my hand on the face of the rock before which I stood. My hand had touched it for a single heart-beat, no more, when I felt the color go out of my face, leaving me with wide, staring eyes, while I stood trembling and ghastly white in the breathless gloom. Like one suddenly bereft of all power of speech or motion I stared mutely at the black wall before me. I had felt the rock move!

Standing there in that awful darkness, hundreds of feet underground, I understood what had happened, what was happening, and, dumb with the horror of that awful knowledge, stood motionless. All the stories that I had ever heard or read of sudden irruptions of water in mines, of dreadful cavings-in, flashed into my mind, and then, breaking the paralyzing trance of terror, I turned and ran toward the main tunnel.

I tried to utter a warning shout as I ran, but my stiffened lips gave forth no sound. Happily, as I reached the main tunnel, the light at the foot of the shaft was in direct range with my vision, and between the shaft and myself I plainly saw a man hastening toward it. He was wearing a light gray coat. A quick glance toward the spot where I had left father and Joe showed nothing but darkness. They had both left.

The hoisting cage was down, and, as I raced toward it, the man in the gray coat scrambled in. Even in my terror and excitement I was conscious of an unreasonable, desolate sense of desertion when I saw that. Yet, underneath it all a lingering fragment of common sense told me that father would believe me, by this, safe above; he had told me to go--and I had not obeyed him.

Behind me, as I ran, arose a shrill and terrible chorus, a cras.h.i.+ng of timbers, yells and shrieks of men, the terrific braying of the Andalusian mules, and above all, a new sound; the mighty voice, the swelling roar of imprisoned waters taking possession of the channels that man had inadvertently prepared for them. I reached the hoisting cage so nearly too late that it had already started on its upward journey, when, seeing me, one of its occupants reached down, caught both my upstretched hands and swung me up to a place by his side. It chanced, providentially, that the cage was at the bottom of the shaft when the inrush of waters came, and it had been held there for a brief, dangerous moment while the men nearest the shaft fled to its protection. It rose slowly upward, not too soon, for in an incredibly short time an inky flood rolled beneath it; rolled beneath, but seemed to keep pace with it as it arose. The water was coming up the shaft.

CHAPTER III

AT THE MOUTH OF THE SHAFT

Rutledge was standing by the windla.s.s as the cage drew slowly up into the light. The men sprang out, not forgetting to lift me out with them, and the superintendent craned his neck, looking down into the black hole from which we had ascended. "Keep back!" he shouted, as some of the men crowded about him. "Keep back; the water is coming up the shaft. We'll soon have a spouting geyser, at this rate. How many of you are there?" He glanced over the group and answered his own question, in an awed voice: "Seven--and the girl--G.o.d help us! Only seven!"

I had been so blinded by the fierce white glare of sunlight, following on the darkness of the shaft, and so dazed by the awful nature of the calamity that had befallen us that at first I comprehended almost nothing. The events of the day recorded themselves automatically upon my mind, to be clearly recalled afterward. In a numb, dazed way I saw a man in a light gray coat creep stiffly from the cage, last of all, and, as he staggered away up the dump, I took a step toward him, looked in his face, and recoiled with a wild, heart-broken cry.

The wearer of the coat was old Joe. Facing around, I looked on the rescued men, my heart beginning to beat in slow, suffocating throbs--my father was not among them.

For a moment I was quite beside myself. Like one gone suddenly mad, I sprang at the negro, and, seizing his arm, shook it furiously, crying:

"Father, father--where is my father? What have you done with my father?"

The old man began to whimper, "I ain' done nuffin'! I wish't I had! I wish't hit was me dat done gone to respec' dat ole Watkin's Lateral, den I'd 'a' been drownded, an' he wouldn't!"

"Watkin's Lateral?" echoed one of the men who had so narrowly escaped. "Was Gordon in there? That's where the water burst through first. I thought that some one might have gone in there to test the walls, and they'd given way."

"You are probably right, Johnson. Not but what the walls would have caved in, just the same, whether they were struck or not."

Little heed as I paid, at the moment, to what was going on or being said, yet it all impressed itself upon my mind, to be recalled afterward, and afterward I knew that this last observation of Mr.

Rutledge's was intended to exonerate father from any charge of carelessness in going into that place at just that time. But every employee of the Gray Eagle knew that Watkin's Lateral--a long, diagonal pa.s.sage, with which the main tunnel was connected by a number of side extensions--was a treacherous place in which to work at all times, and must, of necessity, have been trebly so this morning.

Loosing my frenzied hold of old Joe, I crouched to the ground, while Joe sank down on the dump, covering his face with his gnarled old hands. "He made me tuck an' put on his coat, he did, an' tole me fur t' start fur home; I was dat racked wid de misery in my back!" he moaned.

The men were again cl.u.s.tering about the shaft. I got up and went and stood beside them. A hollow roar came up from the depths into which we gazed. The black water had risen, and risen, until, touched by a ray of sunlight, it threw back at us a sinister, mocking gleam, as the eye of a demon might. And father was down there in that black grave! That was my one coherent thought as, after the first wild look, I suddenly grasped one of the ropes of the cage that still swung above the shaft's mouth, and swung myself aboard. My reckless hand was on the starting lever when Mr. Rutledge, with a cry, and a spring as quick as my own had been, landed beside me. He s.n.a.t.c.hed my hand from the lever.

"Are you mad?" he asked, sternly, "What are you going to do?"

"I am going down to my father; I am going to bring him up!" I cried wildly.

As though the words had held a charm to break the spell of silence, they were followed by a babel of groans, of outcries and entreaties.

It seemed that all the surface population of Crusoe were already on the spot; all, and especially the women, were wild to go to the rescue of the doomed men below. Doomed! Ah, they were past that now--all of them--all! It was this solemn thought that suddenly calmed me, that made me yield quietly to Rutledge's guiding hand as he drew me from the cage. "There are men here," he said. "Stand back, all of you women." He took his place in the cage again; then he looked around on the a.s.sembled men.

"d.i.c.k," he said, signalling out a square-built Scotch miner, "stand beside the hoist, and do exactly as I tell you."

"I wull that!" returned the miner, taking the station indicated.

"I'm going down as far as the water will allow," Rutledge explained.

"Who comes with me?" A dozen men volunteered instantly. Rutledge selected two who stepped into the cage beside him.

"There may be fire-damp--gas," the Scotchman said, warningly.

"I know; there is, probably; I'll look out for that. Lower away!"

Rutledge had lighted one of the miner's candles which was suspended by a cord from a crack in the bottom of the cage. We above leaned over that dreadful well and watched the tiny flicker of light as the cage swung down and down toward the sinister eye that came steadily up as it went down. The tiny flame burned bravely for a s.p.a.ce, then it went out as suddenly as if snuffed out by invisible fingers while the water below moved and sparkled as it might have done if the owner of the demoniac eye had laughed. "Choke damp!" said the Scotch miner succinctly, and began hoisting up.

I was crouching on the ground with my face hidden on Joe's shoulder when the cage came up again. The men sprang out silently, and the hush on the waiting throng seemed to deepen.

"We will set the pumps at work as soon as it can be done; that is the only thing left for us to do," I heard Rutledge say, and his voice sounded far away to my reeling senses as it might have sounded had I heard it in some dreadful vision of the night. Then he came and knelt down beside me; he took my hands in a close grasp. "Go home, Leslie,"

he said, "go home and do not come back. We will do all that can be done."

Not many hours thereafter the pumps were at work, lifting the water out of the mine--a Herculean task, but not so long a one, or so hopeless, as had been antic.i.p.ated by many. Soon fresh mounds of earth began to appear in the lonely little hillside cemetery; mounds beneath which the rescued bodies of the drowned miners were reverently laid.

Among them was one where father lay peacefully sleeping by mother's side, and leaving him there at rest, we turned sadly away to take up again the dreary routine of our every-day life.

CHAPTER IV

A PLOT FOILED

It was a full month after the mine accident, and things had settled back as nearly into the old routine as was possible with the head of the household gone. I doubt if Jessie and I could have carried the burden of responsibility that now fell upon our unaccustomed shoulders had it not been for Joe. The day after father's funeral he walked quietly into the kitchen with the announcement:

"I'se come ter stay, chillen! Whar yo' gwine want me ter drap dis bun'le?"