THE FALL.
It was true. Carolan’s quick eye had noticed the opportunity for
Rennie to escape, and his fertile brain had been swift in planning an
immediate rescue. The few members of his order that he could find on
the instant were gathered together; there was a sudden onslaught at a
dark corner of the Court-House Square; the sheriff and his deputy lay
prone upon the ground, and their prisoner was slipping away through the
dark, foggy streets, with a policeman’s bullet whizzing past his ears,
and his band of rescuers struggling with the amazed officers.
But the sheriff of Luzerne County never saw Jack Rennie again, nor was
the hand of the law ever again laid upon him, in arrest or punishment.
As Tom walked home from the railroad station that night through the
drizzling rain, his heart was lighter than it had been for many a day.
True, he was nervous and worn with excitement and fatigue, but there
was with him a sense of duty done, even though tardily, which brought
peace into his mind and lightness to his footsteps.
After the first greetings were had, and the little home group of three
was seated together by the fire to question and to talk, Tom opened his
whole heart. While his mother and Bennie listened silently, often with
tears, he told the story of his adventure at the breaker on the night
of the fire, of his temptation and fall at Wilkesbarre, of his mental
perplexity and acute suffering, of the dramatic incidents of the trial,
and of his own release from the bondage of bribery.
When his tale was done, the poor blind brother, for whose sake he had
stepped into the shadow of sin, and paid the penalty, declared, with
laughter and with tears, that he had never before been so proud of Tom
and so fond of him as he was at that moment; and the dear, good mother
took the big fellow on her lap, as she used to do when he was a little
child, and held him up close to her heart, and rocked him till he fell
asleep, and into his curly hair dropped now and then a tear, that was
not the outcome of sorrow, but of deep maternal joy.
It was well along in December before the strike came to an end. There
had been rumors for a week of an approaching compromise between the
miners and the operators, but one day there came word that all hands
were to be at the mines, ready for work, the following morning.
It was glad news for many a poor family, who saw the holidays
approaching in company with bitter want; and it brought especial
rejoicing to the little household dependent so largely on the labor of
Tom and Bennie for subsistence.
The boys were at the entrance to the mine the next morning before the
stars began to pale in the east. They climbed into a car of the first
trip, and rode down the slope to the music of echoes roaring through
galleries that had long been silent.
The mules had been brought in the day before, and Tom ran whistling
to the mine stables to untie his favorite Billy, and set him to his
accustomed task. There came soon a half-dozen or more of driver-boys,
and such a shouting and laughing and chattering ensued as made the
beasts prick up their long ears in amazement.
“All aboard!” shouted Tom, as he fastened his trace-hook to the first
trip of cars. “Through train to the West! No stops this side o’
Chicorgo!”
“’Commodation ahead! Parly cars on the nex’ train, an’ no porters
’lowed!” squeaked out a little fellow, backing his mule up to the
second trip.
“I’ll poke the fire a bit an’ git the steam up fur yez,” said Patsy
Donnelly, the most mischievous lad of them all. Whereupon he prodded
Tom’s mule viciously in the ribs, and that beast began playing such a
tattoo with his heels against the front of the car as drowned all other
noises in its clatter.
“Whoa, Billy!” shouted Tom, helping Bennie into the rear car of the
trip. “Whoa, now! Stiddy--there, git-tup!” cracking his long leather
whip-lash over Billy’s ears as he spoke, and climbing into the front
car. “Git-tup! Go it! Whoop!”
Away went Tom and Bennie, rattling up the long heading, imitating
alternately the noise of the bell, the whistle, and the labored puffing
of a locomotive engine; while the sound-waves, unable to escape from
the narrow passage which confined them, rolled back into their ears in
volumes of resounding echoes.
Ah, they were happy boys that morning! happy even though one was
smitten with the desolation of blindness, and both were compelled to
labor, from daylight to dark, in the grimy recesses of the mine, for
the pittance that brought their daily bread; happy, because they were
young and free-hearted and innocent, and contented with their lot.
And Tom was thrice happy, in that he had rolled away the burden of an
accusing conscience, and felt the high pleasure that nothing else
on earth can so fully bring as the sense of duty done, against the
frowning face and in the threatening teeth of danger.
Sometimes, indeed, there came upon him a sudden fear of the vengeance
he might meet at Rennie’s hands; but as the days passed by this fear
disturbed him less and less, and the buoyancy of youth preserved him
from depressing thoughts of danger.
Billy, too, was in good spirits that morning, and drew the cars rapidly
along the heading, swinging around the sharp curves so swiftly that
the yellow flame from the little tin lamp was blown down to the merest
spark of blue; and stopping at last by the door in the entrance, where
Bennie was to dismount and sit all day at his lonely task.
Three times Tom went down to the slope that morning, through Bennie’s
door, with his trip of loads, and three times he came back, with his
trip of lights; and the third time he stopped to sit with his brother
on the bench and to eat, from the one pail which served them both, the
plain but satisfying dinner which Mommie had prepared for them.
Tom was still light-hearted and jovial, but upon Bennie there seemed to
have fallen since morning a shadow of soberness. To sit for hours with
only one’s thoughts for company, and with the oppressive silence broken
only at long intervals by the passing trips, this alone is enough to
cast gloom upon the spirits of the most cheerful.
But something more than this was weighing upon Bennie’s mind, for he
told Tom, when they had done eating, that every time it grew still
around him, and there were no cars in the heading or airway, and no
noises to break the silence, he could hear, somewhere down below him,
the “working” of the mine. He had heard it all the morning he said,
when every thing was quiet, and, being alone so, it made him nervous
and afraid.
“I could stan’ most any thing,” he said, “but to get caught in a
‘fall.’”
“Le’s listen an’ see if we can hear it now,” said Tom.
Then both boys kept very quiet for a little while, and sure enough,
over in the darkness, they heard an occasional snapping, like the
breaking of dry twigs beneath the feet.
The process which the miners call “working” was going on. The pressure
of the overlying mass of rock upon the pillars of coal left to support
it was becoming so great that it could not be sustained, and the
gradual yielding of the pillars to this enormous weight was being
manifested by the crackling noises that proceeded from them, and the
crumbling of tiny bits of coal from their bulging surfaces.
The sound of working pillars is familiar to frequenters of the mines,
and is the well-known warning which precedes a fall. The remedy is
to place wooden props beneath the roof for additional support, and,
if this is not done, there comes a time, sooner or later, when the
strained pillars suddenly give way, and the whole mass comes crashing
down, to fill the gangways and chambers over an area as great as that
through which the working extended, and to block the progress of
mining for an indefinite time.
Tom had been too long about the mines to be ignorant of all this, and
so had Bennie; but they knew, too, that the working often continued
weeks, and sometimes months, before the fall would take place, though
it might, indeed, come at any moment.
That afternoon Tom told the slope boss about the working, and he came
and made an examination, and said he thought there was no immediate
danger, but that he would give orders to have the extra propping of the
place begun on the following day.
“Jimmie Travis said he seen rats goin’ out o’ the slope, though, when
he come in,” said Tom, after relating to Bennie the opinion of the mine
boss.
“Then ’twon’t be long,” replied Bennie, “’fore the fall comes.”
He was simply echoing the belief of all miners, that rats will leave
a mine in which a fall is about to take place. Sailors have the same
belief concerning a ship about to sink.
“An’ when the rats begin to go out,” added Bennie, “it’s time for men
an’ boys to think about goin’ out too.”
Somehow, the child seemed to have a premonition of disaster.
The afternoon wore on very slowly, and Bennie gave a long sigh of
relief when he heard Tom’s last trip come rumbling down the airway.
“Give me the dinner-pail, Bennie!” shouted Tom, as the door closed
behind the last car, “an’ you catch on behind--Whoa, Billy!” as the
mule trotted on around the corner into the heading.
“Come, Bennie, quick! Give me your hand; we’ll have to run to catch him
now.”
But even as the last word trembled on the boy’s lips, there came a
blast of air, like a mighty wind, and in the next instant a noise as of
bursting thunder, and a crash that shook the foundations of the mines,
and the two boys were hurled helplessly against Bennie’s closed door
behind them.
The fall had come.
The terrible roar died away in a series of rumbling echoes, and, at
last, stillness reigned.
“Bennie!”
It was Tom who spoke.
“Bennie!”
He called the name somewhat feebly.
“Bennie!”
It was a shout at last, and there was terror in his voice.
He raised himself to his feet, and stood leaning against the shattered
frame-work of the door. He felt weak and dizzy. He was bruised and
bleeding, too, but he did not know it; he was not thinking of himself,
but of Bennie, who had not answered to his call, and who might be dead.
He was in total darkness, but he had matches in his pocket. He drew one
out and stood, for a moment, in trembling hesitancy, dreading what its
light might disclose. Then he struck it, and there, almost at his feet,
lay his cap, with his lamp still attached to it.
He lighted the lamp and looked farther.
At the other side of the entrance, half-hidden by the wreck of the
door, he saw Bennie, lying on his side, quite still. He bent down and
flashed the light into Bennie’s face. As he did so the blind boy opened
his eyelids, sighed, moved his hands, and tried to rise.
“Tom!”
The word came in a whisper from his lips.
“Yes, Bennie, I’m here; are you hurt?”
“No--yes--I don’t know; what was it, Tom?”
“The fall, I guess. Can you get up? Here, I’ll help you.”
Bennie gained his feet. He was not much hurt. The door had given way
readily when the boys were forced against it, and so had broken the
severity of the shock. But both lads had met with some cuts and some
severe bruises.
“Have you got a lamp, Tom?”
“Yes; I just found it; come on, let’s go home.”
Tom took Bennie’s hand and turned to go out, but the first step around
the pillar, into the heading, brought him face to face with a wall of
solid rock which filled every inch of the passage. It had dropped,
like a curtain, blotting out, in one instant, the mule and the cars,
and forming an impassable barrier to the further progress of the boys
in that direction.
“We can’t get out this way,” said Tom; “we’ll have to go up through the
airway.”
They went back into the airway, and were met by a similar impenetrable
mass.
Then they went up into the short chambers beyond the airway, and Tom
flashed the light of his lamp into every entrance, only to find it
blocked and barred by the roof-rock from the fall.
“We’ll have to go back up the headin’,” said Tom, at last, “an’ down
through the old chambers, an’ out to the slope that way.”
But his voice was weak and cheerless, for the fear of a terrible
possibility had grown up in his mind. He knew that, if the fall
extended across the old chambers to the west wall of the mine, as was
more than likely, they were shut in beyond hope of escape, perhaps
beyond hope of rescue; and if such were to be their fate, then it
would have been far better if they were lying dead under the fallen
rock, with Billy and the cars.
Hand in hand the two boys went up the heading, to the first opening
in the lower wall, and creeping over the pile of “gob” that partially
blocked the entrance, they passed down into a series of chambers that
had been worked out years before, from a heading driven on a lower
level.
Striking across through the entrances, in the direction of the slope,
they came, at last, as Tom had expected and feared, to the line of the
fall: a mass of crushed coal and broken rock stretching diagonally
across the range of chambers towards the heading below.
But perhaps it did not reach to that heading; perhaps the heading
itself was still free from obstruction!
This was the only hope now left; and Tom grasped Bennie’s hand more
tightly in his, and hurried, almost ran, down the long, wide chamber,
across the airway and into the heading.
They had gone scarce twenty rods along the heading, when that cruel,
jagged wall of rock rose up before them, marking the confines of the
most cheerless prison that ever held a hopeless human being.
When Tom saw it he stopped, and Bennie said, “Have we come to it, Tom?”
Tom answered: “It’s there, Bennie,” and sank down upon a jutting rock,
with a sudden weakness upon him, and drew the blind boy to a seat
beside him.
“We’re shut in, Bennie,” he said. “We’ll never get out till they break
a way into us, and, maybe, by the time they do that, it’ll be--’twon’t
be worth while.”
Bennie clung tremblingly to Tom; but, even in his fright, it came into
his mind to say something reassuring, and, thinking of his lonesome
adventure on the day of the strike, he whispered, “Well, ’taint so bad
as it might be, Tom; they might ’a’ been one of us shut up here alone,
an’ that’d ’a’ been awful.”
“I wish it had ’a’ been one of us alone,” answered Tom, “for Mommie’s
sake. I wish it’d ’a’ been only me. Mommie couldn’t ever stan’ it to
lose--both of us--like--this.”
For their own misfortune, these boys had not shed a tear; but, at
the mention of Mommie’s name, they both began to weep, and, for many
minutes, the noise of their sobbing and crying was the only sound heard
in the desolate heading.
Tom was the first to recover.
A sense of the responsibility of the situation had come to him. He
knew that strength was wasted in tears. And he knew that the greater
the effort towards physical endurance, towards courage and manhood,
the greater the hope that they might live until a rescuing party could
reach them. Besides this, it was his place, as the older and stronger
of the two, to be very brave and cheerful for Bennie’s sake. So he
dried his tears, and fought back his terror, and spoke soothing words
to Bennie, and even as he did so, his own heart grew stronger, and he
felt better able to endure until the end, whatever the end might be.
“God can see us, down in the mine, just as well as He could up there
in the sunlight,” he said to Bennie, “an’ whatever He’d do for us up
there He’ll do for us down here. An’ there’s them ’at won’t let us die
here, either, w’ile they’ve got hands to dig us out; an’ I shouldn’t
wonder--I shouldn’t wonder a bit--if they were a-diggin’ for us now.”
After a time, Tom concluded that he would pass up along the line of the
fall, through the old chambers, and see if there was not some opening
left through which escape would be possible.
So he took Bennie’s hand again, and led him slowly up through the
abandoned workings, in and out, to the face of the fall at every point
where it was exposed, only to find, always, the masses of broken and
tumbled rock, reaching from floor to roof.
Yet not always! Once, as Tom flashed the lamp-light up into a blocked
entrance, he discovered a narrow space between the top of the fallen
rock and the roof, and, releasing Bennie’s hand, and climbing up to it,
with much difficulty, he found that he was able to crawl through into
a little open place in the next chamber.
From here he passed readily through an unblocked entrance into the
second chamber, and, at some little distance down it, he found another
open entrance. The light of hope flamed up in his breast as he crept
along over the smooth, sloping surfaces of fallen rock, across one
chamber after another, nearer and nearer to the slope, nearer and
nearer to freedom, and the blessed certainty of life. Then, suddenly,
in the midst of his reviving hope, he came to a place where the
closest scrutiny failed to reveal an opening large enough for even his
small body to force its way through. Sick at heart, in spite of his
self-determined courage, he crawled back through the fall, up the free
passages and across the slippery rocks, to where Bennie stood waiting.
“I didn’t find any thing,” he said, in as strong a voice as he could
command. “Come, le’s go on up.”
He took Bennie’s hand and moved on. But, as he turned through an
entrance into the next chamber, he was startled to see, in the
distance, the light of another lamp. The sharp ears of the blind boy
caught the sound of footsteps.
“Somebody’s comin’, Tom,” he said.
“I see the lamp,” Tom answered, “but I don’t know who it can be. There
wasn’t anybody in the new chambers w’en I started down with the load.
All the men went out quite a bit ahead o’ me.”
The two boys stood still; the strange light approached, and, with the
light, appeared, to Tom’s astonished eyes, the huge form and bearded
face of Jack Rennie.