HER father did it! Her father! Her father! Dick continued to repeat these
words as he procured candles and prepared himself for a journey into the
deep mines. He was conscious of a double duty; he must rescue Harry Hardy
from the rising waters and save the father of Christina Shine from a
terrible crime, and yet he went about his task as if moved by an external
impulse. The work had been mapped out for him by someone or something
apart, and he undertook it without a thought of its dangers or a hint of
revolt. In fact, he was feverishly anxious to face the black Red Hand
shaft and the great, lone workings beyond. He lit one candle, put several
pieces in his pocket with the matches, and started on his journey. He was
oblivious to his surroundings, oblivious to everything but the object of
his quest--Harry Hardy, lying far below in the dripping main drive of the
Silver Stream. His large dark eyes, staring unblinkingly, seemed as if
set on a vision of his friend prone on the muddy floor of the drive, with
the treacherous waters stealing amongst his hair. The present mission had
nothing in common with those fanciful adventures that had served to make
the boy the wonder and despair of his native township. Richard Haddon was
entirely forgotten for the time being, and this concentration of mind and
energy served to carry the boy bravely over every obstacle.
Dick made his way through the opening he and Ted had fashioned, dropped
into the Red Hand drive beneath, and then turned with familiar feet and
hastened towards the shaft. A few centres had been knocked out and thrown
across the pit as a staging, so that access to the ladder was possible,
but not with out some risk. The boy paused at nothing, reached the iron
rungs with a bound, and started down the perpendicular ladder. Down, down
he went for many minutes, his candle feebly illuminating a blurred patch
about his head. Above, through a bewildering space of darkness, the
grated opening at the surface shone like a faint star in another sphere;
below was solid blackness; about him the slime of the dripping timbers
sparkled in the candle's rays. Down, down, down! The journey might have
seemed interminable--a long pilgrimage into the earth's black
distances--had the boy had a mind for it, but he thought nothing of the
task; at length his feet struck the slabs over the well, and turning he
flashed his light into the cavernous depth of a big drive.
He plunged into the drive without a pause, and now the way was familiar
again. Voyages of discovery made during crib time when he officiated as
tool boy in the Silver Stream had often brought him up the jump-up into
the Red Hand drive. Down that jump-up he scrambled now, and stood in the
first level of the Silver Stream where the rich gutter had dipped away. A
short journey brought him to a balance shaft. Down this to the lower
level he travelled without any difficulty, and his journey was almost
completed. He was in the bottom drive hastening towards the face where
Rogers and Shine had left their victim. He could hear the far-off
throbbing of the plunger in the big Stream pumps as it drew the water
into the lifts, and above it all the strange murmur of a great mine, like
the voice of a distant sea.
Finding an empty truck the boy ran it before him on the rails. He was
experienced miner enough to know that one can only travel quickly in this
way in a wet drive full of ruts and pitfalls. Passing the 'S' drive,
where the robbers had done their work, Dick found Harry Hardy just as
Rogers had described him, on his back a few feet up the incline from the
hand-pump that served to drain the low-lying part of the drive. His arms
were thrown out, and his deadly pale face turned up, the chin pointing to
the roof. Upon his forehead were stains of blood, and he lay like a
corpse in the black water. The flood had risen above his ears, and the
boy knew he had come only just in time.
Dick stuck his candle in the soft clay, ran to Harry's head, and lifted
it from the water, and kneeling gazed intently into the cold white face.
He thought his friend dead.
'Her father done it!' he murmured. 'Her father! Her father!
He looked and listened for signs of life; he called Harry's name again
and again, and felt for the beating of his heart, having at the same time
only a vague idea of the location of that organ. He tried to lift the
young man away, but his strength was not equal to the task; and so, after
collecting some pieces of reef to keep Harry's face above the water, he
attempted to drag him out of the reach of the flood. By putting forth all
his power he contrived to draw his inanimate friend a few feet up the
incline; then, by lifting the shoulders an inch or two at a time, he
succeeded in turning Hardy right round with his head farthest from the
rising stream. The boy was now smothered from head to foot with yellow
clay and his lustrous eyes shone from a face daubed with a puddled reef;
and he crouched in the slurry of the drive holding Hardy's head upon his
knee, gazing intently into his face, muttering ever, in a half-puzzled
way the same words:
'Her father! Her father!
The sound of a lump of reef falling from the roof somewhere far down the
drive brought Dick sharply to his feet. His work was not yet
accomplished. The scheme that had come to him without volition was
nevertheless clearly set forth in his mind. He started dragging at Hardy
again, and gradually drew him to the ordinary level of the drive. Once
the water attained this height it would flow away towards the shaft, and
do the young man no harm. Dick feared Harry was dead; but he did not
reason, he only obeyed the instinct that possessed him and that also bade
him avoid the incoming shift. If the men found him there he would have to
tell all, and her father had done it--her father! A swift panic seized
Dick; he snatched up his candle and ran back the way he had come. It was
hours, he imagined, since he lay listening to Rogers and Shine above the
quarry, and he wondered that the night-shift men were not below long ere
this. He reached the balance shaft without having seen a man, and climbed
swiftly to the upper level. His race was continued along these workings
to the jump-up. Once in the Red Hand drive he was safe from discovery,
but the feverish activity still possessed him. How he climbed that
fearful flight of ladders up the black wet shaft he never knew. He
remembered nothing of the agony of the toil the day after, when all
seemed like a dream.
He made his way into the Mount of Gold drive again. An impulse moved him
to block the opening connecting the two drives with loose reef, and the
same impulse led him to hide the skin bag containing the gold away under
the dirt in the shaft of the Mount of Gold. The excitement that had
driven him to the rescue of Harry Hardy sustained him till he had crawled
out into the quarry; then his strength all went out of him, and left him
sick and wretched. He was famished, all his limbs ached with a dull
insistent pain after he had rested for a few minutes, and his weariness
was so great that it was a terrible task to drag himself out of the
quarry. But he succeeded in gaining the hillside at length, and hastened
as quickly as he could through the trees in the direction of the Silver
Stream, stumbling as he went, and sobbing quietly in utter collapse of
strength and spirit.
When Dick reached the vicinity of the big mine he was surprised to find
the brace deserted. He stole up and peered through the engine-house
window at the driver's clock, and saw with dull amazement that it was not
yet half-past twelve. It had taken him little over half an hour to reach
Harry Hardy and return--it seemed to him that he had been toiling for
many hours. He crept in between the long stacks of firewood, made a bed
on the soft bark, and waited. The first night shift of the week did not
start work till one o'clock on Monday morning, and the mine was silent
save for the slow puffing of the pumping engine and the deliberate
rumbling of the bob.
Lying on his stomach on the bark, the boy fixed his eyes upon the mine
and suffered through the slow dragging minutes. He wept incessantly, and
his teeth chattered, although the night was warm. A new fear had taken
possession of him, a fear that Harry Hardy, if alive, would perhaps move
and roll down the incline into the water again before the miners reached
him. He waited in an agony of anxiety, and his eyes never moved from the
cage at the surface.
The miners began to come in at length, with heavy footsteps, swinging
their crib billies, calling to each other in gruff voices. Lamps were lit
upon the brace, and in the boiler-house and changing shed, and Dick saw
the first cageful of men drop out of sight, as the engine groaned and the
mine took up its busy duties again.
One cage-load after another went down, and still Dick waited. At last
there came a wild, unusual beat of the knocker. The boy knew the signal
and started up on his knees. A man rushed past the end of the stacks to
knock up Manager Holden. Others gathered excitedly about the mouth of the
shaft, and the long flat ropes spinning over the pulleys travelled at top
speed.
Soon Harry was brought to the surface, and placed upon a hurdle, and four
men carried him away across the paddocks towards Waddy. Dick followed at
a safe distance. Locky McRae, the boss of the shift, had run on ahead,
probably to warn Mrs. Hardy.
The boy saw Harry carried to his mother's house, saw a man hurry by to
call Mrs. Haddon, and waited for some time after she arrived, hidden in a
gutter near at hand, listening for every word. After about a quarter of
an hour Pete Holden drove his trap to the door, and Dick heard them
talking of the hospital and Yarraman; then he knew that Harry was not
dead, and dragged his worn, aching limbs to his own home, stupefied with
suffering, hunger, and fatigue.
When Mrs. Haddon entered her kitchen an hour later, carrying a flaming
match in her fingers, she was shocked to see a small, yellow-clad figure
crouched in her own particular armchair near the chimney, and surmounting
it a small white face in which burned two astonishing eyes. The little
widow screamed and dropped the light and then screamed again, but a
feeble voice reassured her.
'Richard Haddon, is that you?' she said severely. 'Oh! you wicked, bad,
vicious boy! Where have you been? What've you been doing?'
She was busying herself preparing the lamp, and her tongue ran on.
'You're breakin' your poor mother's heart--breakin' my heart with your
bushrangin' an' villainy, bringin' down the police, an' trouble, an'
sorrow on me.'
The little woman's nerves had been sorely tried of late with her own
troubles and her neighbours', and she broke down now and wept.
'An' you don't care,' she sobbed, 'you don't care a bit how I suffer!
Now the lamp was lit, and the widow turned her streaming eyes upon her
incorrigible young son, and instantly her whole expression changed. She
forgot to weep, she ceased to complain; she gazed at Dick and her bosom
was charged with terror, pity, and remorse. Truly he was a pitiful and
ghostly object, sitting there in his mud, looking very small and pinched,
with unaccustomed hollows in his pale cheeks, and here and there a nasty
bloodstain showing brightly against the yellow clay.
'Dick!' screamed Mrs. Haddon.
The next moment he lay in his mother's arms, clinging to her with
tenacious fingers, crying hysterically, utterly unlike the Dick she
thought she knew so well; and she kissed him, and wept over him, and
murmured to him as if he were really a baby again. She ascribed all to
terror aroused by the knowledge that the police were after him. He had
covered himself with slurry in strange hiding-places, and had had a fall
probably or a blow. He was fed, his clothes were put in water, and
finally he fell asleep in his own bed with his mother sitting by his
side, her hand clasped in his. If Dick had been told a week earlier that
he would ever go to sleep clinging to his mother's hand, he would have
scouted the idea with indignation and scorn; and he remembered the act
later with a blush as something shamefully effeminate or infantile,
betraying a weakness in his character hitherto quite unsuspected.