“You going to stay here till the thing’s going to pop?”
“I mean to stay right here till Mr. Farquhar’s lighted the fuse. There’ll be time then to clear out; it’ll take ten minutes before it explodes. I don’t want any one meddling with these cartridges.”
Lucian had no wish to face the sun before he was forced to; he waited with Charlesworth under the rock. Both were excited. Farquhar, standing beside the igniter thirty feet away, was noticeably nonchalant. The warning whistle sounded at five minutes to two; and, as so often before, the workers swarmed away to places of shelter, some to the summit of the pit, others into chambers cut in the rock where no shock of explosion could reach them. Farquhar gave them five minutes’ grace. A bell sounded; and the watchers saw him stoop and fire the fuse. Immediately Charlesworth uncrossed his legs and stepped towards the gate; and immediately after came a terrific detonation, a terrific eruption of rock, black smoke, and flame and fumes and flying crags; and then the collapse, as it were, of the firmament itself; and, lastly, darkness.
Those who saw it said that at the moment of explosion a huge ball of smoke puffed out and immediately came rolling over and over in black convolutions, rent by ghastly chasms and caverns of sulphurous gloom. They said that the fire flashed out starwise, radiating in a dozen spokes of gold from one common centre; and that the second detonation (for there were two) was more violent than the first. Farquhar saw nothing of this. He was hurled to the earth by the first shock and pinned down there under the fragments during the second; and when he found his senses and sat up he came near fainting again, for the pit was poisoned with fumes. He fell back, and, lying face downward, breathed in the less polluted lower air until the inrushing wind had time to sweeten that above. Then he made another effort, and began to shake off the rocks which had fallen on him. He was horribly bruised; another man would have been disabled. But Farquhar was by nature insensitive to suffering, and, besides, his will scorned to submit to the weakness of his body; he refused to be fettered by pain. This man of many sins was not planning for his own safety; he was remembering only that Lucian had been standing under the rock destroyed, and he swore at the impediments that delayed him as though he could wither them up by the fire of his curses. He struggled free, and saw lying under him the fragments of the detonator, with a length of fuse attached. The appearance of the fuse surprised him, and he took it up. Crossed threads of orange worsted ran over it. By that mark he knew it for what it was: not the ordinary slow fuse which should have been used, but the other, instantaneous kind, where gunpowder is replaced by a quick match, which burns at the rate of thirty feet per second. Now the cause of the catastrophe was clear. Some one had substituted this for the proper fuse, and, to conceal the change, had picked out the distinctive orange threads. Only this piece, hidden in the body of the detonator, had escaped notice to show the manner of their treachery.
Farquhar dismissed the authors of the crime to perdition, along with their instrument. Now he was standing up and could see the ruin that had been wrought; the beautiful stone, destined for such fine purposes, was shattered, almost pulverized. It was not till afterwards, when the evidence came to be weighed, that he realised how this had come about; for the substitution of the quick fuse should have made a difference in the time of the explosion but not in its results. The truth was that only half the strands had been changed; the rest were left as slow fuse; so that instead of one there were two explosions, which, acting separately, broke the rock to pieces. But Farquhar cared little for his ruined enterprise. He looked round the smoking amphitheatre, he saw the faces of the men who had come with him from England, who were of one blood with those entombed; he lifted his arm, from which the sleeve had been wrenched together with part of the flesh, and called out to them in their native tongue:
“Men, there are two Englishmen buried under these rocks; it’s our business to get them out.”
The strange acoustic properties of the quarry carried his words to every man there. He put a point to them by himself lifting a pick, which the explosion had cast at his feet, and beginning to work. In two minutes a dozen men were working at his side; in ten, every soul, native or foreign, was taking his part. To do the men justice, murder had not been in their thoughts; they had aimed only to spoil the rock. If the manager, who usually fired the mines, should happen to get hurt, it would be a lamentable incident; but the presence of Charlesworth and Lucian immediately under the rock they had not foreseen, and, indeed, had not known of till Farquhar spoke. Now they could only hope to atone by willing labour.
Through all that long hot summer afternoon they toiled and toiled and toiled. Men from the village of Petit-Fays volunteered to relieve those who were spent, and took their turn with the pick in rotation, but Farquhar refused to leave work. He tied a strip of linen round his wounded arm, which grew more painful when the muscles contracted; but he went on digging. He knew that his immense and disciplined strength had a special value. Mentally he could not rest and physically he would not, though the men began to look at one another as the hours passed in vain. Sunset found them still working; and the gracious coolness of night with its million stars. At last, at midnight, one of the English workmen (the same whom Lucian had liked so much) came to Farquhar and said, very respectfully:
“Beg pardon, sir, but is it any use going on?”