With some difficulty we hauled him back up. From his bag he selected the drills he thought he would need and from a bottle poured out what seemed to me an extra generous quantity of black powder.
"Be careful and not use too much of that stuff," I called as he disappeared again through the hole. "Ned always said that was your worst failing."
"Don't you worry, Sophie," he replied; "it will take a good big dose to open this safe."
For several minutes we sat there listening to the rasping of his drills against the door of the safe. Just as we felt that tug on the rope which was the signal to haul him up, we saw the flare of his lighted match and heard the sputter of the fuse.
We pulled on the rope for all we were worth but before George's body was within two feet of the hole in the floor there came a blinding flash, followed by an explosion that shook the building.
Although dazed by the shock and half blinded by the cloud of dust and poisonous fumes which poured up through the hole, we managed to keep our hold on the rope and haul our helpless comrade out of the death trap in which the premature explosion had caught him.
"George!" I called, as we lifted the rope from under his arms. But he never answered and I thought it was only a corpse that we laid gently on the floor. His hair and eyebrows were completely burned off, his face and hands were as black as coal and he was bleeding from an ugly wound in the head.
We forgot the money we were after—we forgot the danger of being caught—in our anxiety for our wounded friend. One of the men brought water while I tried to force a drink of brandy down his throat. It seemed an age before he came to his senses, raised himself on one elbow and roughly pushed me aside.