“Billy! Thank God!” It was David’s voice.
Billy roared so joyously that all other tones were lost for a time, but, at last, Roy and David caught Saxe’s higher pitch, and they were glad anew. Across the room, questions and answers were volleyed. It was made known that Roy and David, at the first rush of the lake upon them, had held to the projections of the rock where they had just made fast the tackle, and had climbed higher until they were safe above the flood. Now, they rested aloft on a tiny shelf of stone, only a little way beneath the roof, and they, even as Saxe and Billy, realized to the full the impossibility of escape from this sepulchre within the earth. And Roy lamented in characteristic fashion, after Saxe and Billy had explained the cause of the lake’s in-flow, which had been a mystery to the other two.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t have had a chance at Masters before he went.”
David’s voice, usually so kindly, was harsh as he spoke:
“The skunk got us, after all,” he mourned. He added, with frank ferocity: “Damn him!” He knew, as did the others, that such speech concerning the dead was unseemly. Yet none rebuked him. For a moment, the warmth of wrath was comfort against the chill desolation of their case.
Nevertheless, Billy Walker’s ruling passion was so strong that not even death might daunt it. The action of Masters required some explanation, to make all clear before the less-orderly minds of his friends. So, after a period of reflection, he expounded his understanding of the engineer’s part in the final act of their drama. The volume of his voice was such that he did not need to go beyond his usual conversational thundering to be heard distinctly by those on the opposite side of the chamber.
“Masters, naturally, didn’t mean to do this thing,” he declared. “He wasn’t the type to commit suicide. He kept track of us all the time. How he did it doesn’t matter especially. Probably, he used another entrance to the cavern, which we don’t know. Anyhow, he learned what it was we had found down this way. I guess he spied on us, and heard you, Roy, and Dave, working on the tackle, and took it for granted we were all here together. He thought he could burrow through, and get at the gold himself while we were off after help. He meant to blow an opening just big enough to get through, I fancy. He failed to take into consideration the frailness of the roof that stood between the passage and the lake. He blew a hole in the bottom of the lake—and that was the beginning of our troubles, and the ending of his. He couldn’t find a refuge like ours in that other passage. Exit Masters—I regret our fate, but not his.” With this succinct statement, the sage relapsed into silence, which continued until Roy relieved his overwrought feelings by a denunciation against fate.
“I’ve been on the edge of dying many a time,” he declared, bitterly; “but I was never up against this sort of thing before, and I’m free to say that I don’t like it. There’s some satisfaction in being done to death in a good fight, or in battling your best against any kind of odds. Of course, a man doesn’t exactly want to die, any time. But what puts me in the dumps is this particular variety of dying that we’re up against here. We’ve got to sit roosting on a shelf in the dark, like a heathen idol in a temple after it’s been buried in an earthquake—and we’ve just got to sit till we starve to death. I do hope I run across Masters in the next world.”
“Let us hope for your own sake that both you and Dave do not have your wishes granted concerning Masters in the next world,” Billy exclaimed. The grim jest was not amusing in their situation. The three hearers shivered a little, and were silent.
Afterward, the four gave themselves to serious meditation, as is fitting to men in the presence of death. On one occasion, Billy, in answer to a question from David, discoursed freely on the reasonableness of belief in a future life, and pleaded in defense of such faith with a lucid sincerity and completeness that first surprised, then comforted his audience. Each, after his own fashion, believed in the continuance of life through death; none the less, each was loath to put off the garment of mortality. Billy Walker would fain have remained on earth for a larger accumulation of its wisdom, with which, as it seemed to him, he had only just begun. Saxe’s heart was near to breaking over the knowledge that he must go from Margaret into the unknown places, where she would not be. Roy felt the like desolation because of May. David, since he had no particular thing to regret with superlative sadness, let his longing touch on many things, and grief was heavy upon him, because he must lose all—all!