I was crouching on the ground with my face hidden on Joe’s shoulder when the cage came up again. The men sprang out silently, and the hush on the waiting throng seemed to deepen.
“We will set the pumps at work as soon as it can be done; that is the only thing left for us to do,” I heard Rutledge say, and his voice sounded far away to my reeling senses as it might have sounded had I heard it in some dreadful vision of the night. Then he came and knelt down beside me; he took my hands in a close grasp. “Go home, Leslie,” he said, “go home and do not come back. We will do all that can be done.”
Not many hours thereafter the pumps were at work, lifting the water out of the mine—a Herculean task, but not so long a one, or so hopeless, as had been anticipated by many. Soon fresh mounds of earth began to appear in the lonely little hillside cemetery; mounds beneath which the rescued bodies of the drowned miners were reverently laid. Among them was one where father lay peacefully sleeping by mother’s side, and leaving him there at rest, we turned sadly away to take up again the dreary routine of our every-day life.
CHAPTER IV
A PLOT FOILED
It was a full month after the mine accident, and things had settled back as nearly into the old routine as was possible with the head of the household gone. I doubt if Jessie and I could have carried the burden of responsibility that now fell upon our unaccustomed shoulders had it not been for Joe. The day after father’s funeral he walked quietly into the kitchen with the announcement:
“I’se come ter stay, chillen! Whar yo’ gwine want me ter drap dis bun’le?”