Jem lowered himself to a sitting position, and was in the act of trying to rest on his elbow when he gasped quickly two or three times, and caught at Don, who helped him to a kneeling position, from which he struggled up.
“Hah!” he ejaculated; “just as if some one caught me by the throat. Oh, how poorly I do feel. Just you put your head down there, Mas’ Don.”
Don stood thinking and trying to grasp what it meant. Then, with some hazy recollection of dangers encountered in old wells, he bent down cautiously and started up again, for it gradually dawned upon both that for about two feet above the floor there was a heavy stratum of poisonous gas, so potent that it overcame them directly; and it was into this they had plunged as soon as they had stooped down.
“Why, Jem,” panted Don; “it stops your breath!”
“Stops your breath? It’s just as if a man got hold of you by the throat. Why, if I’d stopped in that a minute I should never have got up again.”
“But—but, that man?” whispered Don.
“What, old Ramsden? Phew! I’d forgot all about him. He’s quiet enough.”
“Jem, he must be dying.”
“I won’t say, ‘good job, too,’ ’cause it wouldn’t be nice,” said Jem, with a chuckle. “What shall us do?”
“Do?” cried Don. “We must help him.”