In another moment he had stepped into the cage and looped down the iron rail in front of it. There was a moment's silence among the panic-stricken people as the cage began to move downward.
At the bottom of the shaft a group of men waited to ascend. Their faces were lurid in the dim light. Before the cage grounded Hugh Ritson could hear their breathing. "How many of you are left?" he asked.
"No'but two now—Giles Raisley and auld Reuben," answered one of the men. The others, without heeding the master's question, had scrambled into the cage, and were already knocking the signal for the ascent.
Hugh Ritson turned toward the working known among the men as the sandy vein. The cage was now rising, and the pitman who had spoken found himself left on the pit bottom; the single moment that he had given to the master had lost him his chance of a place. He cast one stern glance upward, and a muttered oath was on his lips. At the next instant he had taken the direction followed by Hugh Ritson, and was walking one pace behind him.
In the silence the dull thud of their footsteps on the rock beneath mingled with the drip, drip of the water overhead. When they had gone a hundred yards down the narrow working there came another and far more terrible sound. It was such a sound as the sea might have made if it had rushed through a thousand crevices in the rock. It was the sound of the thousands of tons of sand as they forced their way from the dense mass above. And over the hiss as of the sea was the harsh crack of great timbers splitting like matchwood.
Toward the awful scene of this tumult Hugh Ritson quickened his steps. The man followed close at his heels. Presently their passage was blocked with sand like a wall. Then over their heads the cross-trees cracked, and the upright forks split and bent at the right and left of them. In another moment the ground beneath them shook under the new weight that lay on it. They stepped quickly back, and in an instant, with a groan such as the sea makes when it is sucked by the ebbing tide from a cave in a rock, the floor, with all its freight, went down a score of feet. It had fallen to an old working that lay below.
Then the bent forks hung from the roof in empty air. Silence followed this shock, and through the silence there came a feeble cry for help. Hugh Ritson stepped out, plucked his candle from his hat, and held it before his feet.
"Where are you?" he called, and his voice came back through the echoing depths beyond. Presently a man could be dimly seen clinging to a cross-piece in an alcove made for an air-shaft from the main working. To get to him the treacherous ground must be crossed, with its cracking roof, through which the sand slid even yet, and under the split timbers that still creaked.
Hugh Ritson did not hesitate; he turned to leap down, saying, "Follow me." But the man clung to him from behind.
"For God's sake, dunnot!" he cried. "I can not go there. It's mair nor my life is worth!"