Why had Jim brought up two of the wounded men and left the third, their oldest friend, still in the depth of Rainbow Mine? It was impossible not to believe that Jim had done this because these men were not too badly injured to be helped.
For he had now placed his burden on the ground and was examining the young man with the skill and care of a surgeon, while some one else bathed the face. A stretcher had been secured for the foreman who was now being taken to his own quarters to await the coming of a surgeon.
"Jim," Ruth Colter put her hand on her husband's shoulder and her face was almost as white and strained as it had been during her last speech with him, "the elevator is going down again and you are not going with it. Tell us, please, what has happened to Ralph?"
Without waiting to hear her guardian's answer Frieda suddenly burst into tears. Of course she had been dreadfully unnerved by the recent accident and now this uncertainty about their friend, besides the sight of their new acquaintance stretched out there at her feet as though he were dead when the last time she had seen him he had been eating his dinner, was more than she could bear.
"Ralph? Great Scott, I am a brute, Ruth, Jean, Frieda!" Jim Colter exclaimed. "Why didn't I tell you at once? Ralph isn't badly hurt at all; he is bruised and burnt and shaken up, but nothing more, so far as I could tell. So of course he insisted that we bring up the two other fellows first. It's a plain miracle that there's anything left of the three of them. So far as I could understand somebody had fixed a bomb down at the end of the pit shaft, but the thing was clumsily made and only half went off. Ralph said they were blown about a good deal and the atmosphere was pretty thick, but unless the new foreman has been injured internally there was no great harm done. I think this young man has nothing more serious the matter with him than a broken leg. And I expect we shall be able to mend that for him at Rainbow Lodge."
At these words Henry Russell opened his eyes, but whether because of Jim's suggestion or the pain he was enduring, or whether because the sight of the girls, he groaned aloud and then closed his lips again.
"I don't think he wants to be taken to the Lodge," Frieda suggested mournfully. "You see he wants us to think he has gone away."
Then possibly because Ruth's and Jim's nerves had both been strained almost past endurance for the past half hour they laughed aloud at Frieda's speech.
Jean had slipped away and it was her white and yet happy face that Ralph Merrit saw first as he came back into the world of daylight again. There, though he was staggering and nearly blind and covered with blood and grime from the shock he had just received, he found Jean's hands before any others and held them close for a moment while she murmured:
"I am so glad, so glad; it is because you have some big work to do in the world that you have been saved, I am sure, Ralph."