From ahead came strange, gurgling, choking sounds, rising from somewhere–growing weaker.
“Where–where are you, Ruddy? Answer! R-rap–rap out something, if you can!” he adjured.
And it was–truly–a rapping reply that reached him; a queer, hollow knocking at the door of some throat that semed shutting.
“My word! What on earth ... what in thunder’s got him?” Stud felt his own breath blow hot and cold together, but–this crucial moment it came back to him–the eyes of a girl out there had driven it home, with blue lightnings, that he did not have to defy his teeth.
“Humph! I’m no quitter,” he told the piloting breast-ray, blazing its ruby trail ahead. “Well-ll! for the love of Mike! Well! what do you know about that?... What have we h-here?”
In answer to his gasping snort, as he gaped and gasped there in the darkness, the little safety lamp told him what it made of it–of the staggering sight–it made a pair of big feet in rough cowhide boots tightly wedged by the ankles in a buckling switch of rock where two sharp, narrow ridges that formed the bottom of the Tinker’s Pot dovetailed into each other,–after the manner of rails at a switch.
Ruddy, the slipslop explorer, had gone in heels over head, so to speak. He was hanging by the heels now. Nothing visible of him but those pinioned feet!
“Hea-vens! he did strike a blind bargain. S-such a snag! The passage ends here. A drop! A–blank–fall of rock! Gee-ee!”
Dank–dank as cave-tears now was the moisture upon Stud’s forehead. For the first time his teeth almost chattered. What would he see when he held the lamp over the edge of the Tinker’s Pot into the horror of that empty space beyond where the passage broadened into blankness and the rock shelved sharply down? A dead boy? Or one so far gone from hanging that he could not be rescued?
At the first sight of those wedged feet he had felt inclined to laugh. Now he was laughing at the wrong side of his mouth, as he peeped over the brink.