“The creek’s doing something to us!” he cried out. “Don’t you hear that roar? It’s a flood! And it’s coming this way! Run for it!” Then remembering suddenly that, with the door-yard ledge gone, flight out of the cave in the darkness could mean nothing but a neck-breaking plunge into the gulch below: “The tunnel heading—that’s the highest place there is! Climb for it!”
CHAPTER XII
NO SURRENDER!
The flood in the cave, already three or four inches deep on the floor and pouring out of the entrance in a splashing cataract when the three boys made a mad scramble for the mine tunnel, rose swiftly to a roaring, bellowing torrent as they stumbled in black darkness up the inclined drift and crowded themselves into the highest part of the heading.
How long the imminent threat of death, either by drowning or stifling, lasted they could never tell, though minutes can easily figure as hours under such terrifying conditions. But one thing they were made quickly to realize, and that was that the upward pitch of the tunnel was all that was saving them from being drowned, like rats in a trap. A sudden, half-suffocating increase in the air pressure, making their ears ring and their hearts pound like laboring pumps, told them that the water had risen above the mouth of the tunnel in the main cave and was compressing the pocketed air. And it was the subsidence of this pressure that first gave them assurance that the worst was over—that the fury was expending itself.
Dick was the first to speak, and his teeth were chattering.
“They’ve g-got us this time!” he stammered. “Th-this is what they went up the mountain for yesterday morning with the picks and shovels. They came down into the cave and stopped the creek off behind that fallen roof and let the water back up. They knew that when it got head enough it would push that loose stuff out and come down here and drown us!”
“I guess you’ve sized it up about right,” Larry agreed, trying to wring some of the water out of his dripping clothes. Then: “How about you, Purdy? Are you still alive and kicking?”
“As much of me as hasn’t been soaked out and washed away—yes. But let’s get out of this wet hole.”
“When we do, it will only be to get into a wetter one,” said Dick, shivering in his wet clothes.