"Pretty awkward if it should happen to bump us," remarked MacPherson with a grin.
His companion answered with a shrug.
"We'd never know what struck us," he said. "There's enough dynamite in that car to blow up half the mountain if it ever jumped the track."
The words were hardly out of his mouth before a miner came running through the tunnel toward them.
"A truck has been wrecked round the curve, just below the shaft," he cried. "I'm going to telephone to the surface and tell 'em to stop that dynamite car. If it——"
He stopped abruptly and his jaw fell. At that instant the red car flashed past with a rumble and roar, and shot round the curve at high speed.
"Down on your faces!" shouted the miner excitedly; and down on their faces they all three flung themselves without loss of time. Hardly had they done so before there was a roar that seemed to shake the earth to its foundations. The lights on the wall of the tunnel went out, and the three men were raised from the ground and slammed down again with sufficient violence to knock the breath out of them.
MacPherson was the first to recover himself. But the other two regained their faculties speedily and, sitting up, strove to collect their scattered senses. They were in pitch darkness, and only MacPherson had any matches in his pockets. These were struck sparingly as they groped their way along the tunnel. But before they had gone more than a few yards they were brought up "all standing" by a mass of rock. It had been dislodged by the explosion, and lay in great masses, completely blocking the tunnel and, as they realized, with thrills of horror, imprisoning them.
Luckily they were all men of nerve, and, instead of losing their senses, began to calculate ways and means of escape. But their deliberations brought them to no satisfactory conclusion.
Before them lay a wall whose thickness they had no means of knowing. Behind them the tunnel terminated at the vein already mentioned. They were prisoners, hundreds of feet under the earth, and how were they to know if they would ever be rescued, or even if any attempt would be made to do so.