He leaned toward her eagerly.
“What can I do” he repeated.
“Oh, I don’t know!” she murmured in anguish. “But if you—if you leave me—Oh! What was that?”
From the direction of the quarry had come a great scream of terror, as if many men suddenly had cried out in fear of their lives. Then, almost ere the echoes had died away, came another sound, of more sinister significance to Toppy. There was a sudden low rumble; the earth under their feet trembled; then the noise of a crash and a thud. Then it was still again.
A chill seemed to pass over the entire camp. Men began running toward the quarry with swift steps, their faces showing that they dreaded what they expected to see. Toppy and Campbell looked silently at one another.
“Go into the office,” he said quietly to the girl. “Come on, Scotty; that roof’s caved in.” And without another word they ran swiftly toward the quarry. As they reached the river-bank they heard Reivers’ voice quietly issuing orders.
“You guards pick those two fellows up and carry them to their bunks. You scum that’s left, pick up your tools and dig into that fallen rock. Hustle now! Get right back to work!”
The first thing that Toppy saw as he turned the shoulder of the ledge was that two of the older Slavs were lying groaning on the ground to one side of where the pit mouth had been. Then he saw what was left of the pit. The entire side of the ledge had caved down, and where the pit had been was only a jumbled pile of jagged rock. Reivers stood in his old position before the pile. The hawk-nosed shotgun guard stood up on the little rise, his weapon ready. The remaining workmen were huddled together before the pile of fallen stone. The terror in their faces was unspeakable. They were like lost, driven cattle facing the butcher’s hammer.
“Grab those tools there! Get at it! The rock’s right in front of you now! Get busy!”
Reivers’ voice in no way admitted that anything startling had occurred. He glared at the cowering men, and in terror they began hastily to resume their interrupted work, filling their wheelbarrows from the pile of stone before them. Reivers turned toward Toppy who had bent over the injured men. “Hello, Dr. Treplin,” he laughed lightly. “A couple of jobs there for you to experiment on. Get ’em out of here—to their bunks; they’re in the way. Patch ’em up if you can. If you can’t they’re not much loss, anyhow. They’re rather older than I like ’em.”