At that moment something went wrong with the hoisting machinery, the upward movement was arrested, and the bucket hung motionless not more than ten feet above the deadly mine. In the awfulness of their common danger, the men forgot their enmity and gazed at each other with horror-stricken eyes. Then, with a groan of despair, Mike Connell sank limply to the bottom of the skip.
CHAPTER IX
WINNING A FRIEND BY SHEER PLUCK
Peveril's lamp had been extinguished during his struggle to force an entrance into the skip, while that in Mike Connell's hat went out as he sank helpless from terror and crouched at the other's feet. So the blackness that shrouded them as with a pall was only faintly illumined by the fitful flashing of the fuses that hissed like so many fiery serpents beneath them. Their red eyes gleamed spitefully through the gloom, and for an instant Peveril, leaning over the side of the skip, gazed at them in fascinated helplessness.
Then he leaped down among them and began to tear them from their connection with the devilish forces that only awaited a signal to burst forth and destroy him. The fiery serpents bit at him as he flung them, to writhe in impotent rage, where they could do no harm; but he heeded not the pain, and after a little they expired, one by one, hissing spitefully to the last.
Some of them had already burned so low that he could not pluck them forth, and was forced to stamp out their venomous lives with the constant knowledge that, should a single spark escape this imperfect method of extinguishment, he would still be lost. So fiercely did he labor that in less than one minute the last visible spark from a score of fuses had glimmered out, and he stood in absolute darkness. But he must wait for a full minute more before he could be certain that none had escaped him, to creep viciously down through the loose tamping and still reach the hidden dynamite. It was a period of the same helpless anxiety that immediately precedes the hearing of a sentence that may be either one of death or acquittal. While it lasted Peveril was bathed in a cold perspiration, his brain reeled, and his limbs trembled until he was obliged to lean against the side of the shaft for support.
As second after second dragged itself away, until it was finally certain that sixty of them had passed, and that sentence had been pronounced in his favor, the young miner sank to his knees and framed, as best he could, a prayer of gratitude. How long he thus remained in grateful contemplation of his narrow escape from death he never knew, but he was at length aroused by a shout from above, and, looking up, saw an approaching light twinkling like a star of good promise through the blackness. The call that came to him was one of anxious uncertainty; but, as his answering shout sped upward, it was changed to an exultant cry of joy. Then came cheer after cheer as the skip slowly descended until it finally reached the bottom, and a solitary figure sprang from it.