The command steadied her again. Obediently she took the fowling-piece and watched him tear at the rock-wall, getting his fingers in where the grey-blue light rippled at its widest. Piece after piece of wet-worn rock crumbled to his grasp, till he got his arm through at last.
Causleen saw a broader stream of light break softly through the dark. Storm, the sheep-slayer, was pressing his rough snout against her, and somehow he, like the Master, brought courage home again.
“How can the light break through?” she asked, as a child might.
Hardcastle glanced back from the sweat of his toil. “There’s a full moon on Logie-side, and we’re winning fast to it.”
“Oh, God be thanked,” said Causleen. “And shall we see the hills again, Dick, and hear the winds go by?”
“With luck, we shall,” said Hardcastle, riving at the wall-face afresh.
He was checked now by a thicker and less yielding slab of rock. Tug as he would, his grip was powerless to widen the breach, and again the sense of desperate haste returned. They were so near freedom, but behind them was all the stealth of Garsykes.
He felt about in the rubble at his feet till his hands closed on a round boulder-stone, and with this he hammered feverishly wherever a crack showed. He was steaming now with the effort, and the slender breeze that drifted in through the opening he had made, did little to relieve the cavern’s dank, lifeless air.
At last there was an answer to his toil. The cracks broadened suddenly, and the next hard blow brought a mass of splintered stones to ground.
Hardcastle went at it with fresh, dogged hope. Slow as the work was, he could get one shoulder through the opening now, and the thought came, across the dull confusion of his mind, that Causleen needed a narrower doorway out than he. Another fall like the last, and she could creep sideways into safety.