“I’ll go easily till I come to it,” he said, his voice sounding strained and loud although he had spoken scarcely above a whisper. “You stand clear so that if anything gives, Bill, you won’t be caught.”
The elder miner would have protested, but already he was slowly and cautiously climbing the ladder. Step by step he ascended, holding the light above his head to discover the place where the shaft had given way, and then Bill, standing anxiously below, heard a harsh shout.
“I think the ladder will bear your weight as well as mine. Come up here.”
The big man climbed steadily upward until he stood directly beneath the younger man’s feet. He ventured an exclamation that was almost an oath.
“Not the shaft at all,” he said, an instant later. “It’s just a bowlder so big that it filled the whole opening. We’re plugged and penned in here like rats in a trap!”
Dick took his little prospecting hammer and tapped the bowlder, at first gently, then with firmer strokes, and looked down at his partner with a distressed face.
“Hear that?” he exclaimed, rather than questioned. “It’s a big one, and solid. It sounds bad to me.”
For a minute they waved their candles round the edge, inspecting the resting place of the rock that had imprisoned them. Everywhere it was set firmly. A fitted door could have been no more secure. They consulted, and at last Bill descended and stepped back into the entrance to the drift to avoid falling stone, while the younger man attacked the edge beneath the bowlder, inch by inch, trying to find some place where he could pick through to daylight. At last, his arm wearied and the point of his prospecting hammer dulled, he rested.
“Come down, Dick, and I’ll take a spell,” Bill called up from below, and he obeyed.