A heavy iron bar lay on the ground and with it the girl forced the chain and bent all her strength to the great lever that should launch the stored wheat into its quicksand flow. She flung her good muscles and her substantial weight so fiercely into that effort that the shaft snapped at its fulcrum—but not until it had done its work.
Alexander rushed for the brow of the cliff, and this time she was not obstructed. The relaxed vigilance of a job well done had stolen upon the watchers.
The journey down the precipice was one that had its difficulties, and Alexander's brain was reeling with a score of terrors—yet somehow she reached the tracks.
O'Keefe would not be in the wheat bin itself, she reflected. It would be dark in there too—until the light became a glare of death. Unless he chanced to hear, through other and fiercer sounds the soft flow of the myriad kernels, he would have no means of knowing that one desperate way was being opened to him. Even then his single hope would lie in quickness of perception and a sureness of judgment that acted flawlessly and smoothly under a supreme strain.
If he did see that the wheat was running out and did not wait for it all to spill itself, he would be sucked into its tide only to emerge dead. For it flowed slowly, pressing in every direction, and it would inevitably strangle the breath out of his lungs.
Even if he were judging all these odds with a meticulous nicety, Alexander questioned herself breathlessly, would there be time to wait for the full store to flow through that narrow channel? It was a race between a slow tide which could not be hurried and another which rushed on with the devouring fury of mania.
The girl threw herself down beside an empty freight car and dug her cold finger nails into her hot temples. She could hear the steady stream of wheat flowing into the bin there, and the deadly slowness of its progress through the hopper was driving her mad. The elevator she could not see, but by lifting her head, she could see out all too clearly the crimson sky overhead.
CHAPTER XIX
When the first acrid warning of scorched timbers came to his nostrils, Jerry O'Keefe had recognized the desperation of his plight and he laid out his simple plans in accordance. He meant to stay where he was till the last endurable moment, hoping against hope for the coming of the rescuers. When it was no longer possible to remain, he would go out of the door and sell his life at a price—but he knew he would have to sell it, and perhaps cheaply, for they would do their killing from cover.