CHAPTER III
AT THE MOUTH OF THE SHAFT
Rutledge was standing by the windlass as the cage drew slowly up into the light. The men sprang out, not forgetting to lift me out with them, and the superintendent craned his neck, looking down into the black hole from which we had ascended. “Keep back!” he shouted, as some of the men crowded about him. “Keep back; the water is coming up the shaft. We’ll soon have a spouting geyser, at this rate. How many of you are there?” He glanced over the group and answered his own question, in an awed voice: “Seven—and the girl—God help us! Only seven!”
I had been so blinded by the fierce white glare of sunlight, following on the darkness of the shaft, and so dazed by the awful nature of the calamity that had befallen us that at first I comprehended almost nothing. The events of the day recorded themselves automatically upon my mind, to be clearly recalled afterward. In a numb, dazed way I saw a man in a light gray coat creep stiffly from the cage, last of all, and, as he staggered away up the dump, I took a step toward him, looked in his face, and recoiled with a wild, heart-broken cry.
The wearer of the coat was old Joe. Facing around, I looked on the rescued men, my heart beginning to beat in slow, suffocating throbs—my father was not among them.
For a moment I was quite beside myself. Like one gone suddenly mad, I sprang at the negro, and, seizing his arm, shook it furiously, crying:
“Father, father—where is my father? What have you done with my father?”
The old man began to whimper, “I ain’ done nuffin’! I wish’t I had! I wish’t hit was me dat done gone to respec’ dat ole Watkin’s Lateral, den I’d ’a’ been drownded, an’ he wouldn’t!”
“Watkin’s Lateral?” echoed one of the men who had so narrowly escaped. “Was Gordon in there? That’s where the water burst through first. I thought that some one might have gone in there to test the walls, and they’d given way.”
“You are probably right, Johnson. Not but what the walls would have caved in, just the same, whether they were struck or not.”