Then he saw a sight that almost paralysed his heart. The mountain-side immediately opposite to him was slipping, coming down with a rush, as though it had been struck by an invisible hand and was being hurled to the bottom of the chasm. Hundreds of tons of loosened rock and earth were crashing down-wards, and the horror-stricken men who saw what was happening were shouting, screaming, gesticulating, for well they knew the fate of any who should be struck unawares by the swift-descending mass. Jones started to run, then stopped, apprehensive of what might happen next; he could not be certain that the wall which towered above him, or even the terrace on which he stood, might not also suddenly slip away. His mind was dazed; he felt that he had been very near to death, and, for all he knew, might be near to it still.
He looked about him; hundreds of men were running towards the huge pile of debris below. He noticed that the train lines down there had been torn away and twisted as if they were merely wire; some machinery had been dashed to pieces. Was anyone killed? he wondered.
People were clambering down the sides of the terraces; he ran towards them, joined them, and found that he could descend without great difficulty. All the men seemed to know in what direction they should go; he heard them saying to one another that the rock-fall had not been unexpected, that the engineers had noticed cracks some days before, which had led them to believe that once again Culebra would put their patience to the test. He gathered that on this particular section much work was not being done; perhaps, then, no one had lost his life. But the men were not certain; the slide was a bigger one than ordinary. Thus talking in snatches and exclamations, slipping, climbing, running, they reached the bottom of the Cut.
Here a crowd was already collected, a crowd working with might and main, digging away at something as if their lives depended upon it. Jones pushed his way to the front; he saw that the diggers were at work upon the earth and shattered rock that covered a steam shovel partly. This shovel had been in operation when the slide occurred; had it been a few yards farther back it must have entirely escaped. As it was, the men who manned it had had no warning, had not been able to leap clear of the machine and get away in time. It was doubtful if they were yet alive; but nothing was being left undone to save them, if they could be saved.
“Who are they?” Jones heard one American in the crowd ask another. “Any white men?”
“Two, and a coloured man,” was the answer: “poor fellows.”
The news spread; dark faces turned ashen with horror. A thousand people waited to hear if there was any hope—or none.
“What’s their name?” Jones kept on asking of persons who paid no attention to him. At last one of them who worked in this part of the Cut, hearing the question, replied, “The white men name Jackson an’ Campbell; the black man is Mackenzie.”
Jones went suddenly cold. “Mackenzie?” he repeated. “Mackenzie being suffocated to death?” He fought his way to where the men were digging. The thought uppermost in his mind was that his old friend was dying, dying horribly. “Good God!” he exclaimed, and the next instant, seizing a shovel from the heaps which had been hurriedly brought up, he was digging amongst the labourers like a man gone wild.
Not as his rival, not as the husband of Susan, did he think of Mackenzie now. For those few moments of his life Jones was utterly unselfish.