negro, too, had disappeared. Plegg was the alternative now, and she ran
breathlessly up the yard to the office bunk car. But this, also, proved
to be a hope defeated, or at least deferred. The car was dark when
she reached it, and when she tried the door she found it locked. The
remaining expedient, the only one that suggested itself, was to run to
the Inn railroad station a half-mile distant down the yard, where she
knew there was an accessible telephone. It was a lame expedient and she
knew it; a thousand things might delay the sending of the message of
warning to the tunnel, and time was priceless. Yet she ran, stumbling
over the loosely bedded cross-ties, and praying that she might happen
upon Plegg or some other member of the staff who would know what to do
and how to do it.
She had scarcely begun this new flight when she saw one of the
construction locomotives lumbering toward her on the main track. The
quick wit was coming to its own again, and she stopped, stripping off
her coat and stepping into the cone of the headlight beam so that she
could be seen when she waved her signal. The engine was Callahan’s
“mogul,” and she gave a little sob of joy when she recognized the
good-natured Irishman who leaned from his cab window to ask what she
wanted. Callahan was the driver with whom she had ridden oftenest when
David Vallory had been showing her over the job.
“I want you and your engine, Mr. Callahan!” she panted. “Will you take
orders from me?”
“Sure I will, Miss Vinnie,” was the quick response; and when the
fireman had helped her up to the foot-board: “Where will ye be wanting
the ould ’Thirty-six to be taking you?”
“To the tunnel--as fast as ever you can go! It’s--it’s life and death!”
Callahan asked no further questions. Miss Virginia was the big boss’s
daughter, and her demands were sufficient law and Gospel for any man on
the Grillage Company’s pay-rolls. While the fireman was lifting her to
his box, the heavy construction machine went slamming out over the yard
switches, shrieking its warning to all and sundry, and the race was
begun.
Though the track was new and rough, and the detours around the hill
cuttings held curves of hazard, Callahan--“Wild Irish,” they called
him on the job--slackened speed for nothing. Onward and upward through
the gathering darkness roared the big locomotive, vomiting a trail of
sparks to mark its crooked climb. Virginia Grillage tried pitifully
hard to plan what she should do when the goal should be reached;
but the dominant impulse would have nothing to do with cool-headed
plannings. David’s life hung in the balance, and David must be warned.
She could get no further than this.
So it came about that when the tunnel portal was reached, and Callahan
and his firemen were helping her down from the high cab, common
sense and clarity of mind fled away, and she was once more only an
incoherent and badly frightened young woman. A gang of workmen waited
at the tunnel mouth; dimly she realized that this was the night shift,
preparing to go in when the day men should come out. One glance showed
her that there was no member of the engineering staff with them; no one
in authority save the burly Cornish drill-boss.
“Mr. Vallory!” she demanded; “where is he?”
The Cornishman knew the president’s daughter by sight. He pointed into
the dark depths of the tunnel. “If ye’ll wait just a minute; it’s time
for the shift to be coomin’ out, and he’ll be----” but the remainder
of the sentence was lost upon the young woman who had darted into the
black depths with neither light nor guide, stumbling blindly over the
cross-ties of the spoil-track in her flight, and following the lead
of the wide-spaced line of electric bulbs into the grim heart of the
mountain.
* * * * *
A scant margin of two minutes after his daughter had halted and boarded
a construction engine to be whirled away to the tunnel, Eben Grillage,
who had been across to the commissary to put in a call for Plegg,
returned to his desk in the _Athenia_ and once more began the reading
of his neglected mail. A matter of three-quarters of an hour later,
while he was still immersed in his correspondence, the swing-door of
the forward corridor flew open as from the impact of a heavy projectile
and Silas Plegg staggered into the office compartment. His lips were
drawn back and he was shaking like one in an ague fit.
“The roof in Heading Number One!” he jerked out. “It’s down, damn you,
do you hear that?--it’s down, and the day shift is behind it!”
Eben Grillage’s heavy face went purple, and for an instant his jaw
sagged and he gasped for breath. Then the strong will triumphed for the
moment over the failing body and he sprang out of his chair to catch
the news-bringer in a grasp that threatened to crush muscle and bone.
“Vallory--where’s David Vallory?” he stormed.
“He’s--he’s in there with the men--and--and that isn’t all: your
daughter’s there, too--if she isn’t buried under the slide!”
Slowly the big man’s grasp upon Plegg relaxed and the veins in his
forehead swelled to whip-cords. Eben Grillage’s day of reckoning had
come. Before the first assistant realized what was happening, the
gigantic figure of the contractor-king swayed like a toppling tower
and would have fallen with a crash if Plegg had not braced himself and
caught it.
XXVI
The Heart of Qojogo
Virginia Grillage, flying into the tunnel depths over the rock-strewn
spoil-track, was mercifully spared the introductory horrors of the
sudden entombment. An earthquake crash, so close behind her that she
was enveloped in a shower of flakings and spallings and stifling dust,
a rush of air that was like a tornado to sweep her from her feet, and
she stumbled and fell and was blotted out.
When she recovered consciousness there was darkness that could be felt
and a silence to match it. She was lying on a pallet of coats; she knew
they were coats because the sleeves of one of them were drawn over her;
and some one was chafing her hands.
“Is it you, David?” she asked in a voice made small and weak by the
horrible stillness.
“Yes; can you tell me how badly you are hurt?”
She grasped his arm and sat up.
“I--I think I’m not hurt at all,” she stammered. Then: “Did the roof
come down?”
“It did. We found you half buried in the muck. What under heaven were
you doing in here?”
“I came to tell you,” she said simply. “Where are the men?”
“They are all down at the slide, and Regnier is with them. They are
trying to find out how effectually we are buried. You are sure you’re
not hurt?”
“A little bruised and shaken up, of course, but that is nothing. Will
the men be able to dig us out?”
With any other woman he knew as the questioner, David Vallory might
have temporized. But he knew Virginia Grillage’s quality and the
steel-true fineness of it.
“We shall not be able to dig out from this side,” he said soberly. “We
are not equipped for it.”
She shuddered.
“This darkness is very horrible, isn’t it? And the air--it seems so
close.”
David did not tell her that there was the best of reasons for the
closeness of the air; that the ventilating conduit, and the smaller
pipe-line which supplied the air pressure for the drills, were crushed
under the avalanche, leaving them in a sealed pocket in the heart of
Qojogo.
“You mustn’t let it grip you too hard,” he said, meaning to hearten her
if he could. “By this time every camp on the line will have heard the
news, and there will be no lack of help.”
She groped in the darkness and found his hand.
“I am not afraid, David--this is no time to be afraid. So you needn’t
blink the facts for me. How wide was the bad place in the roof?”
“Twenty feet or more.”
“You say there are plenty of men to help; but you know, and I know,
that only a few of them can work at one time in such a narrow place as
the tunnel. Tell me plainly: will there be air enough to last until
we starve to death? Or shall we be stifled before we have had time to
starve?”
“I am not admitting either contingency yet; and you mustn’t. While
there is life, there is always hope. But I can’t understand why you
came here. What made you think I needed to be told?”
“That much is easily explained,” she said calmly. “There was a plot to
murder you, and at the same time to bring about the first of a series
of disasters that would smash the Grillage Company. Did you get a
telephone message that a man was hurt, and that you were wanted up
here?”
“I did. I was at McCulloch’s camp and I took an engine and came up
here in a hurry. The accident report was a fake, and I came in to ask
Regnier what he knew about it.”
“It was a part of the plot,” she went on evenly. “It was Judith
Fallon who came and told me. She had already warned me that there was
something threatening, but she did not know what it was. That first
time was just before Mr. Strayer was hurt, and all she could tell me
then was that James Lushing ‘had it in for you,’ as she put it, and was
plotting with a man named Black Jack Runnels.”
“Runnels?” he queried. “Not Dargin?”
“No, it was Runnels; I’m sure of the name. Yesterday she came again.
She had heard a little more, but nothing very definite. Then this
evening I had been down to the _Athenia_--it came in from Red Butte
on the afternoon train, as perhaps you know--and I was on my way back
to the Inn. Judith met me on the path; she had been up to the hotel,
looking for me.”
“Yes,” he encouraged.
“She was terribly excited and said that the thing, whatever it was, was
to be done this evening, at the changing hour of the shifts. She told
me that a man named Backus was to call you by ’phone and tell you that
there was a man hurt in the tunnel. Then she said that you had already
gone up the line; she saw you on an engine that overtook and passed
her.”
“I saw a woman running on the Powder Can road, but I didn’t recognize
her as Judith,” said David.
“You wouldn’t, of course, with the engine running fast. When she told
me that you were already on your way up here, I didn’t know what to do.
Then I thought of the telephones, and sent her up to the hotel to find
Herbert Oswald and ask him to call you at the tunnel ’phone, while I
ran down to the _Athenia_ to get father to ’phone. There was nobody in
the _Athenia_; father had gone out somewhere. Then I tried to find Mr.
Plegg, but he was gone, too. I didn’t know where to look for another
telephone nearer than the Inn railroad station, and I was starting to
run down there when I saw Callahan on his engine and made him bring me
up here.”
“But surely you saw the night shift getting ready to come in,
didn’t you? Do you mean to tell me that that bunch of thick-headed
stone-borers let you come in here alone?”
“They were not to blame--not at all. I merely asked if you were in
here, and when one of them said you were, I ran.”
“I am too thankful to say what I ought to say, about them and about
you--thankful that you are alive,” said David, and his voice trembled
a little. “One second, a half-second, later and you would have been
fairly under the slide. As it was, we had to dig you out; and--and
Vinnie, I hope no human being will ever suffer as I did when we found
you. I--I thought you were dead, and that I had killed you!”
“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.