But his voice was weak and cheerless, for the fear of a terrible possibility had grown up in his mind. He knew that, if the fall extended across the old chambers to the west wall of the mine, as was more than likely, they were shut in beyond hope of escape, perhaps beyond hope of rescue; and if such were to be their fate, then it would have been far better if they were lying dead under the fallen rock, with Billy and the cars.
Hand in hand the two boys went up the heading, to the first opening in the lower wall, and creeping over the pile of “gob” that partially blocked the entrance, they passed down into a series of chambers that had been worked out years before, from a heading driven on a lower level.
Striking across through the entrances, in the direction of the slope, they came, at last, as Tom had expected and feared, to the line of the fall: a mass of crushed coal and broken rock stretching diagonally across the range of chambers towards the heading below.
But perhaps it did not reach to that heading; perhaps the heading itself was still free from obstruction!
This was the only hope now left; and Tom grasped Bennie’s hand more tightly in his, and hurried, almost ran, down the long, wide chamber, across the airway and into the heading.
They had gone scarce twenty rods along the heading, when that cruel, jagged wall of rock rose up before them, marking the confines of the most cheerless prison that ever held a hopeless human being.
When Tom saw it he stopped, and Bennie said, “Have we come to it, Tom?”
Tom answered: “It’s there, Bennie,” and sank down upon a jutting rock, with a sudden weakness upon him, and drew the blind boy to a seat beside him.
“We’re shut in, Bennie,” he said. “We’ll never get out till they break a way into us, and, maybe, by the time they do that, it’ll be—’twon’t be worth while.”
Bennie clung tremblingly to Tom; but, even in his fright, it came into his mind to say something reassuring, and, thinking of his lonesome adventure on the day of the strike, he whispered, “Well, ’taint so bad as it might be, Tom; they might ’a’ been one of us shut up here alone, an’ that’d ’a’ been awful.”