“But it might be weeks.”
“So it might. I will do it in less time if you will help me.”
“But the cost of doing it your way——”
“I will pay for it myself.”
“My superiors——”
“I will attend to them. I will pay the bills. Get every man you can use and every fan and pump in the district.”
A big price to pay for the bodies of two dead men, they said in the valley when the work had been begun; and the miners who had seen the big teamster patiently going about his work a few days before did not understand at once how he had become a leading figure in the place—commanding, directing, himself labouring ceaselessly, to gain ingress to the huge, black, poisonous cavern.
It was not until the fifth day that they broke into the barricade of the lower slope, whose walls still menaced, and where wholesome air could only be coaxed by prodigious effort; and Wayne was first of all into the tomb where Joe had died. He found him lying with one arm thrown across the body of the broken-backed Pole he had tried to save. It seemed that in the hour of his death he had thus sought companionship—Joe, who had loved light and life and the ways of cities and the haunts of men.
Men came from far to do honour to the poor, blackened body of Joe Denny, who had come into kinship with all heroic dead, and they buried him—it was Wayne’s idea—beside the friendless Pole in the fairest spot the town commanded. Mrs. Blair came with Jean, and Walsh and Wingfield were there, too—and Paddock read the office for the dead. But this was not enough, and at the end the minister stood beside Joe’s grave and spoke to the great throng of the beauty of the life that had gone out, of the nobility of its sacrifice and the glory of it, so that eyes were wet that had never known tears. And when he had finished, as the sun dipped low behind the hills, he raised his hands above the crowd and blessed them, and it seemed that a great peace fell upon the world.