The Donovan chance

by Francis Lynde

The job this time was to transfer the life-giving air stream from the brake mechanism of the car to the rescue pipe, and since there was plenty of air hose available, as there always is on any rock-drilling job, this was soon accomplished. Next, the question arose as to whether or not the imprisoned men had removed the plug which Larry had screwed loosely into the pipe end to keep it from being stopped up with clay in the ramming process.

For a minute or so they tried to tell the prisoners to unscrew the plug, tapping on the pipe and using the Morse alphabet—which they knew Goldrick understood—to spell out the message; but when they failed in the efforts to read the answering taps they took a chance and turned the air pressure on slowly. Immediately a shrill hissing told them that the pipe was open, with the air blowing through into the shut-in tunnel, and a series of rapid taps came to voice the gratitude of the men on the other side of the barrier.

Fortunately, about this time there came a lull in the bombardment from the O. C. rock cutting, and they were able to move about more freely.

“Circulation is the next thing,” Larry snapped out. “You can’t ventilate an air-tight hole just by pumping air into it. If they’ll only happen to think of disconnecting the drills, so that the bad air can come out by the broken pipe——”

A quick dash to the place where the broken pipe had been pulled out of the slide showed that, as yet, nobody inside had thought of disconnecting the drills. So once more they had recourse to the tap-tap telegraphing. Over and over again, Dick, who knew Morse better than Larry did, rapped out his message, “d-i-s-c-o-n-n-e-c-t t-h-e d-r-i-l-l-s,” with Larry on his knees before the hole where the broken pipe had come out, listening for the sounds which would tell him that wrenches were being used at the other end of things.

The sounds came finally, and with them a shot-like blast of escaping air that filled the listener to his shoe-tops with earth and sand.

“Hooray for our side!” he shouted, spitting clay with the words. “I’ve got my mouthful; but they’ve got theirs, too. Now for the picks and shovels!”

Whether or not the four of them, with two of the four obliged to attend to the steam-driven air-compressor and its boiler at least occasionally, could have made much of an impression on the giant slide was a question that didn’t have to be answered—luckily for the shovelers. Brannigan, the driver of the disabled construction engine, had used his own good judgment in letting his machine slide away down the grade out of danger from the flying rocks. Since it was all a descending grade to the construction headquarters camp at Pine Gulch, he had simply kept on going until the camp was reached.

Here the news of the disaster at Tunnel Number Two was quickly acted upon. Another locomotive was run out, a train of two flat-cars was coupled on, and with these loaded with the hastily aroused men of the night shift, a record-breaking dash was made up the canyon.

So it came about that Larry and Dick, and their two willing but weary helpers, were barely at the beginning of the big digging job when the train darted around the down-canyon curve, and a few minutes later as many men as the shallow tunnel cutting could hold were eating their way into the slide like a hundred-armed steam shovel.