Lower and lower they swung and dropped down into the old shaft and as the rope creaked and crazed above them it lilted:
"Choose, choose, wha' you'll tak',
Wha' you'll tak', wha' you'll tak',
Choose, choose wha' you'll tak',
A laddie or a lassie."
And the memory of the old lilt brought back other scenes again and he found himself guiding the chair from the shaft side steering it off with his hand at every rhythmic beat of the child song.
Soon they reached the bottom of the shaft, for it was not very deep, and found a mass of débris, almost choking up the roadways on either side of the bottom. But they got out of their chair and soon began to "redd" away the stones though they found very great difficulty in getting the lamps to burn. Occasionally, as they worked, little pieces came tumbling from the side of the shaft, telling its own tale, and as soon as Robert got a decent sized kind of opening made through the rocks which blocked the roadway he sent up the other man to bring down more help and to get others started to repair the old shaft by putting in stays and batons to preserve the sides and so prevent them from caving in altogether.
He found his way along the level which had been driven to within nine feet of going through on the heading in which the inbreak of moss had taken place. He noticed the roof was broken in many places and that the timber which had been put in years before was rotten. Strange noises seemed to assail his senses, and stranger smells, yet the lilt of that old childish game was ever humming in his brain and he saw himself with other boys and girls with clasped hands linked in a circle and going round in a ring as they sang the old ditty.
"Three breakings should dae it," he said as he looked at the face of the coal dripping with water from the cracks in the roof. "If only they were here to put up the props. I could soon blow it through," and he began to prepare a place for batons and props, pending the arrival of more help from those who were only too eager to come down to his aid.
It was almost an hour before help came in the shape of two men carrying some props. Then came another two and soon more timber began to arrive regularly and the swinging blows of their hammers as they drove in the fresh props were soon echoing through the tunnels, and Robert set up his boring machine and soon the rickety noise of it drowned all others. He paused to change a drill when a faint hullo was heard from the other side.
"Hullo," he yelled, then held his breath in tense silence to hear the response which came immediately. "Are you all safe?" he roared, his voice carrying easily through the open coal.
"Ay," came the faint answer; "but the moss is rising in the heading and you'll have to hurry up."
Robert knew this, and one of his helpers had gone down an old heading to explore and had returned to say that it was rising steadily and was now within two hundred feet from the old shaft down which he had descended.