She groped in the darkness and found his hand.
“I am not afraid, David—this is no time to be afraid. So you needn’t blink the facts for me. How wide was the bad place in the roof?”
“Twenty feet or more.”
“You say there are plenty of men to help; but you know, and I know, that only a few of them can work at one time in such a narrow place as the tunnel. Tell me plainly: will there be air enough to last until we starve to death? Or shall we be stifled before we have had time to starve?”
“I am not admitting either contingency yet; and you mustn’t. While there is life, there is always hope. But I can’t understand why you came here. What made you think I needed to be told?”
“That much is easily explained,” she said calmly. “There was a plot to murder you, and at the same time to bring about the first of a series of disasters that would smash the Grillage Company. Did you get a telephone message that a man was hurt, and that you were wanted up here?”
“I did. I was at McCulloch’s camp and I took an engine and came up here in a hurry. The accident report was a fake, and I came in to ask Regnier what he knew about it.”
“It was a part of the plot,” she went on evenly. “It was Judith Fallon who came and told me. She had already warned me that there was something threatening, but she did not know what it was. That first time was just before Mr. Strayer was hurt, and all she could tell me then was that James Lushing ‘had it in for you,’ as she put it, and was plotting with a man named Black Jack Runnels.”
“Runnels?” he queried. “Not Dargin?”
“No, it was Runnels; I’m sure of the name. Yesterday she came again. She had heard a little more, but nothing very definite. Then this evening I had been down to the Athenia—it came in from Red Butte on the afternoon train, as perhaps you know—and I was on my way back to the Inn. Judith met me on the path; she had been up to the hotel, looking for me.”