And in some way, nobody seemed to know just how, word had gotten to the quarriers on the other side of the river; for now the big O. C. rock cutting was lined with sober-faced onlookers, and never a blast was set off while the rescuers were at work.
“That’s the first really human thing they’ve been known to do since we began scrapping with them,” said Dick, standing aside with Larry to be out of the way of the digging battalion. “I’d like to shake hands with that foreman up yonder, whoever he is; I’ll be switched if I wouldn’t. He’s some——”
The interruption was a great shout, raised when the first of the shovelers broke through the barrier, his shovel clashing against that of one of the drilling squad doing his bit on the other side of the slide. [A minute later the prisoners], grimy and sweating, [were hauled out], one by one, Goldrick, the young engineer, being the last man to come—like a good ship’s captain refusing to leave his post until his men were all safe.
[A minute later the prisoners were hauled out]
“By George!” he gasped, wringing first Larry’s hand and then Dick’s. “I sure had a bad quarter of an hour in there when that roof dropped down and shut us in, and I realized that there were only you two and Beasley and Johnnie Shovel out here to do anything! The air was right bad to begin with, and inside of half an hour we all had our tongues hanging out. Who was it who thought of driving that pipe through the dump?—and how in Sam Hill did you do it?”
Dick was the one who told the story of the pipe-driving expedient, and neither it, nor Larry’s inventive genius, lost anything in the telling.
“I shouldn’t have known any more than a clam what to do when we found that the telephone was dead,” he wound up. “But Larry, here, was right on the job from the jump. All we did was to take orders from him and rush it through.”
Young Goldrick’s eyes were suspiciously bright when he turned to the big, curly-headed fellow and said, “Where do you get all this good stuff, Larry?”
Larry Donovan, as uncomfortable as possible under the praise that Dick had been heaping upon him, blushed like a girl, though his face was so dirty and grimy that the blush couldn’t show much.