"Don't be frightened, Ruth, I shall be all right, dear, and back again with you in ten minutes perhaps. But in any case, girl, don't you see I have got to go down before the others? This is our mine and two of the men down there are almost boys."
Some quiet order Jim then gave and slowly for the second time the lift sank down toward the dark abyss under the earth. For Ruth had made no other sound or protest, only keeping tight hold on Frieda's and Jean's hands. Olive had gone with Jack and Frank Kent in the direction of the Rainbow Lodge.
To the watchers at the pit opening after the elevator had landed the second time there was a moment when they believed that they could hear voices below. Then the waiting seemed interminable. In point of fact only a few moments more had passed before the signal indicated that the car must be drawn up again.
And this time it was Jean Bruce who covered her eyes with her hands.
There was a grinding of the cables and then an unmistakable groan, so it was not only the faces of the women that blanched whiter. Many of these miners were middle-aged men who had been in mining disasters where many hundreds of lives were at stake. Now, since no further disturbance had followed the first brief explosion, they realized that only the three men who had first gone down into the pit had been injured. Yet it was nerve-racking not to be able to foretell whether these three men would be brought up alive or dead.
Jim Colter and one of his helpers were standing upright in the car and Jim held in his arms a limp, crumpled figure, unconscious, his blue overalls charred and blackened, his absurd old hat quite gone. Indeed, the grave and learned professor of ancient languages looked like a broken slip of a boy in the big man's keeping.
There on the floor of the car another figure was resting. The face was upturned to the light and though the eyes were closed the expression of the mouth showed that the man had not fainted but was suffering great pain.
Frieda touched Jean Bruce on the arm.
"It is not Ralph, but the new foreman who seems to be very badly hurt," she whispered. "Look, the other men are carrying him off. I can't tell about Ralph's friend, Mr. Russell. But where is Ralph? Why hasn't he come up with the others?"
And this last question of Frieda's was being echoed in the minds of the waiting woman and girl.