*****
"Fifty pounds to the man who brings him up!" cried Virgie, kneeling upon the very brink.
Gerald had been hauled up, dragged forth from the cave, through the hole, hurried into the open air. He was alive, and they thought he would recover. But the man who had risked his life to save him lay still in the deadly abyss.
One of the workmen, however, speedily upon her appeal, roped himself up.
"Can't be very deep, 'm," he said consolingly. "If I take two ropes with me, that'll be all right. We've got a plenty hands now, and my mates can pull."
He disappeared, and Virgie crouched there on the brink, huddled and shivering, counting the terrible moments.
As she knelt in the dark, dreadful place, full of booming, terrifying noises, all life changed its values before her eyes.
This was a man who had a touch of greatness in him. He made big mistakes; he was also capable of big heroism. She knew in her heart that, if Gaunt had not been there, if the accident had happened with only the Ferrises and herself in the cave, the delay—while men were fetched to do what her husband had immediately and simply done himself—might have been, would have been, fatal. The contrast between Percy, helplessly unnerved, and Gaunt, ready to rise at once to the height of the moment, had flashed itself upon her like an instantaneous photograph. She had herself risen with Osbert. He had called her, given her something to do—quiet, definite orders to carry out. Without a question, she went and did his bidding, though she was longing to break into cowardly pleading, to cry out to him not to throw away his life.
And she returned to find them all busy with Gerald, and nobody apparently giving a thought to the man still in the pit.
She soon changed that. Her beauty, her distress, her urgency, made stronger appeals to the men than her promise of liberal reward. And now everything, everything, hung upon the result—whether the man they brought to the surface would be still alive or not.