He walked back to where Joe lay sleeping heavily, after convincing himself of the reason why the turning had come to an end where it did, for the vein had run upward, gradually growing thinner till, at some thirty feet up, as far as he could make out by his dim light, the men had ceased working, probably from the supply not being worth their trouble.
Joe was muttering in his sleep when Gwyn reached his side, but for a time his words were unintelligible. Then quite plainly he said,—
“Be good for you, father. The mine will give you something to do, and then you won’t have time to think so much of your old wounds.”
“And if he has got out safely and they never find us, this will be like a new wound for the poor old Major to think about,” mused Gwyn. “How dreadful it is, and how helpless we seem! It’s always the same; gallery after gallery, just alike, and that’s why it’s so puzzling. I wonder whether any of the old miners were ever lost here and starved to death.”
The thought was so horribly suggestive that the perspiration came out in great drops on the boy’s face, and he glanced quickly to right and left, even holding up his lanthorn, fancying for the moment that he might catch sight of some dried-up traces of the poor unfortunates who had struggled on for days, as they had, and then sunk down to rise no more.
“How horrible!” he muttered; “and how can Joe lie there sleeping, when perhaps our fate may be like theirs?”
But he had unconsciously started another train of thought which set him calculating, and took his attention from the imaginary horrors which had troubled him.
“Wandered about for days and days,” he mused. “It seems like it, but that’s impossible. It can’t be much more than one, or we couldn’t have kept on. We should have been starved to death. We couldn’t have lived on water.”
He wiped his wet brow, and it seemed to him that the gallery they were in was not so stifling and hot, unless it was that he had grown weaker. Still one thing was certain; he could breathe more freely.
“Getting used to it,” he thought; and, putting down the lanthorn, he seated himself with his back close to the wall.