He knew the crevice, though he had never explored it. It lay at a point almost exactly half-way between the glade and the tramhead. Knowing that the sound would not carry upward and backward over the cliff, he did not waste his breath in vain shoutings. The alternative was a fire signal. If the cloud would but lift a little, and he could gather enough of the dry leaves to make a glow, the light would guide those who must certainly, by this time, be searching for him.
This was his thought while he was nursing the handful of fire and adding more leaves to it. The blaze rose higher and the cavity in the gloom grew larger until it became a hemisphere, with the black scarp of the crevice wall for its flattened side. A thickly matted vine covered the face of the precipice, completely concealing the perpendicular surface upon which it climbed. At its roots in the crevice bottom the dry leaves were bedded a foot deep. Tregarvon was reaching painfully for the mass of fresh fuel when the fire licked out and caught it first. There was a puff of dense smoke, a fierce blaze, and then the climbing vine took fire and was brightly outlined in a network of short-lived flame.
All this was normal enough, but what followed was curiously abnormal. As the fire glowed hotter small fragments of the cliff face began to split off, and these fragments, falling into the burning leaf-bed, sprang alight with hissings and sputterings and much pungent smoke. Tregarvon, ignoring the throbbing ankle, dragged himself an agonizing foot or so nearer and secured one of the splintered fragments. It was coal!
Almost beside himself with excitement, he heaped more leaves upon the fire. By the light of the fresh upblaze he could make out the upper line of the great coal seam. It was at the height of a tall man’s head above the bottom of the cleft, well-defined, unmistakable; the roof shale of a vein fully six feet thick. Here, discovered in the moment of defeat, disaster, and woundings, was the Ocoee’s lavish answer to all the costly questionings.
“My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice, apparently at his elbow, said: “Quite so; if the heavens may be purchased with the gifts of the earth. The gifts are yours, Mr. Tregarvon; first by the right of inheritance, and now by the right of discovery.”
Tregarvon twisted himself into a sitting posture, gritting his teeth at the ankle’s protest and holding his head in his hands. At a little distance away sat the professor of mathematics, one long leg jack-knifed for a support, and the other stretched awkwardly upon a makeshift cushion of the fallen leaves.
“You?” Tregarvon cried. “Did you fall over the cliff, too?”
“I think it was I who showed you the way,” Hartridge amended. “You are a very apt pupil, Mr. Tregarvon. I was scarcely well down here before you played the part of Jill.”
“Are you—are you hurt?”
“Not by your shot-gun charge, happily; but my leg is broken. And you?”