As the two men cleared the doorway there came a racking, splitting, tearing noise; a doubling under of the posts of the front porch; a hail of broken glass and clouds of blinding dust from squares of plaster as the ceilings collapsed; then the whole structure canted—slid ten feet and stopped, the brick chimneys smashing their full length into the crumbling mass. When the dust and flying splinters settled, Herbert and Louis were standing on firm ground within a foot only of the upheaved edge of raw earth. Staring them in the face, like the upturned feet of a prostrate man, were the bottom timbers of the cottage.
Somewhere inside the chaotic mass lay Lemois and Gaston!
A cry of horror went up from the crowd, made more intense by the shriek of a fisher-woman—Gaston’s mother—who just before the crash came had seen her son’s head at the library window, and who was now fighting her way to where Herbert was keeping back the mob until he could make up his mind what was best to do. Her breathless news decided him.
“Louis!” he shouted, his voice ringing above the roar of the sea, “pick out two men—good ones—and follow me!”
The four worked their way to a careened window now flattened within a foot of the ground, crawled over the sill, and Herbert calling out to Lemois and Gaston all the while, crept under a tangle of twisted beams, flooring, and furniture, until they reached what was once the farther wall of the library.
Under an overturned sofa, pinned down but unhurt, white with dust and broken plaster and almost unrecognizable, they found our landlord. Gaston lay a few feet away, the breath knocked out of him, an ugly wound in his head. Lemois had answered their call, but Gaston had given no sign.
Herbert braced himself and in the dim light looked about him. The saving of lives was now a question of judgment, requiring that same instantaneous making up of his mind always necessary when his own life had depended upon the exact placing of a rifle-ball in the skull of a charging elephant. There was not a second to lose. Another slash of the sea and the whole mass might go headlong down the slope, and yet to lift the wrong timber in an effort to free Lemois might topple the entire heap, as picking out the wrong match-stick topples a pile of jackstraws.
He ran his eye over the shattered room; ordered the two fishermen to leave the wrecked building; selected, after a moment’s pause, a heavy joist lying across the sofa; stood by while Louis put his shoulder under its edge, his enormous strength bearing the full brunt of the weight; waited until it swayed loose, and then, grabbing Lemois firmly by the coat-collar, dragged him clear and set him on his feet.
Gaston came next, limp and apparently dead—the blood trickling from his head and spattering his rescuers.
