Ten minutes after Demarest’s violent decision to give Joshua’s plan a trial a gang was at work on the preliminaries of the coyote hole. Joshua was disappointed in not being permitted to boss the job himself, and had no chance to bring Bluenose and his other fellow-workers into the limelight. But he was not yet well enough to have stood the strain of a day in the coyote hole, and there would be no room in there, anyway, for a man who was merely boss. He remained at the camp, the guest of Shanty Madge and her mother, and every day he crawled to the tunnel and spent his time there until sheer weariness forced him down.
A night gang and a day gang worked intermittently, and the coyote hole was growing fast. All efforts to remove the hilltop through the mouth of the main tunnel had ceased, and men awaited with eagerness the outcome of the new experiment.
In less than two weeks the night gang turned the last corner and were “coyoteing” toward the slide. Every care was taken now; the timbering was careful and heavy, the shots extremely light. So far there had been no suggestion of a cave-in in the roof, but the real test of Joshua’s theory would come when they reached the slide and attempted to timber through it, and remove the muck through the coyote hole.
The engineers, Demarest, Tillou, and Joshua spent much of their time at the mouth of the coyote hole now, waiting for word from within. And at last, about ten o’clock one morning, one of the powdermen came out and reported:
“We’ve struck de slide, bossman.”
“Yes, yes, yes!” cried Demarest. “And is she holdin’, ol’-timer?”
The dyno raked a stream of perspiration from his forehead with his forefinger. “She’s holdin’ so far,” he answered, and dived back into his hole on hands and knees.
And hold it did until, five days later, the men had worked their way entirely through the slide, which the great timbers now served to keep in place. Then came a moment when the anxious men in the main tunnel heard them at work beyond the partition of slush that separated them. And an hour after this a timber came poking through, then another, and another, and in fifteen minutes the coyote hole was joined to the main tunnel, with solid roofing overhead.
“Now,” said Joshua Cole to Demarest, “begin working to right and left and widen your coyote hole until it is of the same dimension as the tunnel, and go ahead as if nothing had occurred. I guess I win, Mr. Demarest.”
There was a choke in his voice, and there were tears on the bronze cheeks of Shanty Madge. Demarest’s voice, too, was husky as he said: