For Ches knew that he was alone; that there was no human being within miles to help the man caught in the hand of that mischance but himself, so frantically willing, but so impotent.
“I must git me wits tergedder—I must!” and down came the teeth with all the strength of the boy’s jaw. “Oh, what will I do? What will I do?” The little head waved from side to side in its agony, and a sudden sob struck him in the throat.
After that one small weakness rose Ches Felton, hero. To the mouth of the tunnel he went. Above the tumbled pile of dirt and timber ran a sort of passage, between it and the roof.
A way along which a boy might crawl and find out if all the frames were down—to which the silence of the tunnel gave a bitter assent—or if by some most lucky chance one or two had held, and Jim be safe within.
Ches climbed to the top and thrust his head into the gloom. “Jim!” he called, “Jim!” No answer.
Before him lay the ruin of his pardner’s work. It was over this that his path lay, as deadly dangerous a path as could be found. The slightest disturbing of the roof above might bring down a thousand tons of dirt upon the one who ventured, slowly and hideously to crush his life out, there in the dark, beyond sight and sound of the cheerful world without. With this knowledge before him, and his inborn fear of the dark hole, as daunting as the hand of death itself, he took his soul in his gripe, and wormed his way within.
Sometimes his back grazed a stone in the roof, and the touch of white-hot iron could not have been so terrible; sometimes a falling stone near him would make his heart leap and stop as he waited for the hill above to follow. Foot by foot he made it, twisting around the end of a post, scooping out the dirt most cautiously where the hole was too small for even his slight body.
Once the sharp end of a broken piece of lagging caught in his clothes, and he could go neither forward nor back. There, for a second, he broke down. Bracing up again, he managed somehow to get the old knife out of his pocket and cut himself free.
He could see little.
A gray spectral light filtered in here and there that defined nothing, even when his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.