“Vallory—where’s David Vallory?” he stormed.
“He’s—he’s in there with the men—and—and that isn’t all: your daughter’s there, too—if she isn’t buried under the slide!”
Slowly the big man’s grasp upon Plegg relaxed and the veins in his forehead swelled to whip-cords. Eben Grillage’s day of reckoning had come. Before the first assistant realized what was happening, the gigantic figure of the contractor-king swayed like a toppling tower and would have fallen with a crash if Plegg had not braced himself and caught it.
XXVI
The Heart of Qojogo
VIRGINIA GRILLAGE, flying into the tunnel depths over the rock-strewn spoil-track, was mercifully spared the introductory horrors of the sudden entombment. An earthquake crash, so close behind her that she was enveloped in a shower of flakings and spallings and stifling dust, a rush of air that was like a tornado to sweep her from her feet, and she stumbled and fell and was blotted out.
When she recovered consciousness there was darkness that could be felt and a silence to match it. She was lying on a pallet of coats; she knew they were coats because the sleeves of one of them were drawn over her; and some one was chafing her hands.
“Is it you, David?” she asked in a voice made small and weak by the horrible stillness.
“Yes; can you tell me how badly you are hurt?”
She grasped his arm and sat up.
“I—I think I’m not hurt at all,” she stammered. Then: “Did the roof come down?”