“Five.” And he and Mann disappeared into the tunnel.
Ora waited until the other men had descended one by one and run into the blackness. Then she dislodged one of the candlesticks from the wall and ran after them. When she reached the fault drift she thrust the long point of the candlestick into a stull before turning the corner. Then she crept toward the station, from which she could witness the punishment about to be inflicted upon the Apex men, whatever it might be.
There was a glimmer of light in the new drift. Ora saw the men binding a piece of hose to the same length of pipe. They attached the hose to the air line and held it just inside the ragged hole some twelve feet above.
There was a distant murmur of voices overhead and to the right. The solitary candle was extinguished. The murmur of voices in the drift which led from Apex shaft along the continuation of the Primo vein grew louder. Men were laughing. One man was giving orders. It appeared that they were to let themselves down and go systematically to work on the Perch vein, which was now driving under the Apex claim.
Ora heard a sharp whispered word: “Now!” and barely recognised Gregory’s voice. A second later and she was deafened by the roar and hiss of escaping steam, mingled with shrieks of agony above, and fiendish cat-calls and jeers below, all expressed in the spectacular profanity of the mining camp. The episode was over in a moment. The Apex men tumbled over one another in their anxiety to leave the scene, and those manifestly disabled—Ora could hear them gasping horribly as the steam was turned off abruptly—were dragged away. She felt her own way rapidly along the fault drift, snatched her candlestick from the wall as she turned the corner, and scampered back to the shaft station. When the men arrived she was sitting demurely on the box. Gregory evidently had telephoned from the other station, for the skip came rattling down just before his appearance at the head of his laughing, cursing column.
“Did it go off well?” asked Ora.
“Did it?” cried Mann, tossing his cap in the air.
“They’re settled for the moment,” said Gregory. “They’ll come back at us later with steam on their own air line, and slacked lime; but we’ll be ready for them. They stand no show.”
Two of the men had been left on watch. Gregory lifted Ora into the skip. He and Mann stood on the edge. A second more and Ora was holding her breath as they were hurtled upward at express speed, the metal car banging from side to side of the shaft. In something under three-quarters of a minute Gregory helped her to alight in the shaft house, while the skip descended for the miners.
“Well,” he said, smiling, as she lifted her braid to the top of her head and wound the veil about it, “have you supped full of sensations for one day?”