XXVIThe 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 whichsupplied 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 aman 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 theAthenia—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 toldme 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 theAtheniato get father to ’phone. There was nobody in theAthenia; 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 merelyasked 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 theAtheniafor 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 theends, 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 eestres bon!”
“What did you find out, Jean?” David demanded.
“Eet ees bad—ver’ bad. They vill deeg onthe 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 andinches, 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 surrenderedhis 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 wearemen.”
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 havenever 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 anythingat 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 amsohappy!’”
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.