Without another word the young man felt his way to the end of their little hole, tapped the rock with the shovel, and then stood perfectly still.
“What is it?” asked Abel.
“I was trying to make out where the air comes from, and I think I have hit it. I shall try and slope up here.”
Striking out with the shovel and trying to cut a square passage for his ascent, he worked away for the next hour, the snow yielding to his efforts much more freely than he had anticipated; and as he worked Abel tried hard to keep up with him, filling the tin, bearing it to the other end beyond the sledges, and piling up the snow, trampling down the loads as he went on.
Twice over he offered to take his cousin’s place; but Dallas worked on, hour after hour, till both were compelled to give up from utter exhaustion, and they lay down now in their greatly narrowed cave to eat.
This latter had its usual result, and almost simultaneously they fell asleep.
How long they had been plunged in deep slumber, naturally, they could not tell. Night and day were the same to them; and as Dallas said, from the hunger they felt they might have been hibernating in a torpid state for a week, for aught they knew.
They ate heartily of the biscuits, Abel’s throat being far less painful, and once more the dull sound of the shovel began in a hollow, muffled way.
A couple of hours must have passed, at the end of which time so much snow had accumulated at the foot of the sloping shaft that Dallas was compelled to descend and help his fellow-prisoner.
“This will not do,” he said. “We must get out some more provisions before we bury the sledges entirely.”