“You keep quiet, my lad. I’m a-going to save you.”
“But I can breathe,” cried Abel.
“So can he, or he couldn’t go on working. Two heavy chaps is quite enough to be tramping over his head. Don’t want my sixteen stone to tread it hard. Have a drop more o’ this ’fore I begin?”
“No, no! It is burning my mouth still.”
“Good job too: put some life into you, just when you looked as if you was going to bye-bye for good. Now then, don’t you be skeart. I know how to use a pick; been used to it in the Corn’ll tin-mines. I could hit anywhere to half a shadow round you without taking the skin off. I’ll soon have you out.”
He began at once, driving the pick into the compressed snow; but after the first half-dozen strokes, seeing how the fragments flew, he took off his broad-brimmed felt hat and laid it against Abel’s head as a screen. Then commencing again he made the chips fly in showers which glittered in the sunshine, as he walked backward, cutting a narrow trench with the sharp-pointed implement, taking the prisoner’s head as a centre and keeping about thirty inches distant, and so on, round and round till the channel he cut was as deep as the arm of the pick, and quite clear.
“Feel bad?” he said, pausing for a few moments.
“No, no,” cried Abel. “How are they getting on?”
“Better’n me. If we don’t look sharp your mate—what did you say he was—cousin?—’ll be out first.”
“I hope so,” sighed Abel.