“She’ll go a hundred and fifty to the ton!” Billy exclaimed, after a careful examination of a cooled sample. Then, waving his hand at the huge ore mounds, he groaned: “What a shame that we hadn’t enough labor and capital. We could have run it all through before the rains.”
“Pig! Hog!” Seyd found a vent for his own surplus feelings by punching Billy in the chest. “Think how much worse off we should have been if we had had to mine it. Go down on your American knee bones and thank your lucky stars for the English Johnnies.”
Still smiling, he lay again to watch the glowing matte as Billy ladled it out of the well. It was the culmination of their long labor, but he was too tired even to think, and, giving himself up to a dim luxurious feeling, he insensibly passed into sleep.
“Wake up, Bob, and go to bed. You still have four hours.”
Only half aroused, he arose and stumbled across to the adobe, threw himself down on the bunk without waiting to remove even his boots, and fell into slumber at once so dead and dreamless that it seemed as if his head had no more than touched the pillow before Billy’s voice again rang in his ear.
“Seven o’clock, Bob. I gave you an extra hour.”
“Oh, quit your joshing.” He murmured it, rolling over, and was again almost asleep when a sudden report, louder than thunder, but with a peculiar vibrant note, brought him swiftly to his feet. A second later the door banged to and stuck, but not before they had caught a glimpse of a huge cloud plume, densely yellow, shooting upward above the smelter.
During the moment required to wrench the door from its frame the adobe rocked under the concussion and scattered mud bricks, and there was a rain of stores from the shelves to the floor. It did not require Caliban’s frightened yell on the outside, “Explosion! Una explosion, señores!” to tell them what had happened. The first glance, as they rushed out over the broken door, merely filled in the details of the vivid mental picture each had formed for himself. Hundreds of feet in mid air, the explosion cloud floated like a yellow balloon above the stump of a stack, the half-fused bricks of which were scattered over the bench. A cavity had been torn downward through the solid brick bed to the clay beneath, and, looking down into it, Seyd read the sign.
“Dynamite! What was the last thing you did?”