“I wish it had ’a’ been one of us alone,” answered Tom, “for Mommie’s sake. I wish it’d ’a’ been only me. Mommie couldn’t ever stan’ it to lose—both of us—like—this.”
For their own misfortune, these boys had not shed a tear; but, at the mention of Mommie’s name, they both began to weep, and, for many minutes, the noise of their sobbing and crying was the only sound heard in the desolate heading.
Tom was the first to recover.
A sense of the responsibility of the situation had come to him. He knew that strength was wasted in tears. And he knew that the greater the effort towards physical endurance, towards courage and manhood, the greater the hope that they might live until a rescuing party could reach them. Besides this, it was his place, as the older and stronger of the two, to be very brave and cheerful for Bennie’s sake. So he dried his tears, and fought back his terror, and spoke soothing words to Bennie, and even as he did so, his own heart grew stronger, and he felt better able to endure until the end, whatever the end might be.
“God can see us, down in the mine, just as well as He could up there in the sunlight,” he said to Bennie, “an’ whatever He’d do for us up there He’ll do for us down here. An’ there’s them ’at won’t let us die here, either, w’ile they’ve got hands to dig us out; an’ I shouldn’t wonder—I shouldn’t wonder a bit—if they were a-diggin’ for us now.”
After a time, Tom concluded that he would pass up along the line of the fall, through the old chambers, and see if there was not some opening left through which escape would be possible.
So he took Bennie’s hand again, and led him slowly up through the abandoned workings, in and out, to the face of the fall at every point where it was exposed, only to find, always, the masses of broken and tumbled rock, reaching from floor to roof.
Yet not always! Once, as Tom flashed the lamp-light up into a blocked entrance, he discovered a narrow space between the top of the fallen rock and the roof, and, releasing Bennie’s hand, and climbing up to it, with much difficulty, he found that he was able to crawl through into a little open place in the next chamber.
From here he passed readily through an unblocked entrance into the second chamber, and, at some little distance down it, he found another open entrance. The light of hope flamed up in his breast as he crept along over the smooth, sloping surfaces of fallen rock, across one chamber after another, nearer and nearer to the slope, nearer and nearer to freedom, and the blessed certainty of life. Then, suddenly, in the midst of his reviving hope, he came to a place where the closest scrutiny failed to reveal an opening large enough for even his small body to force its way through. Sick at heart, in spite of his self-determined courage, he crawled back through the fall, up the free passages and across the slippery rocks, to where Bennie stood waiting.
“I didn’t find any thing,” he said, in as strong a voice as he could command. “Come, le’s go on up.”