Two women with shawls over their heads came to the side of the gig. “Be you the doctors?” said one of them; and then in another minute the two were following her up the side of the cutting which here confined the road. The hillside gained, they were hurried round pit-banks and slag-heaps, and under cranes and ruinous sinking walls, and over and under mysterious obstacles, sometimes looming large in the gloom and sometimes lying unseen at their feet—until they emerged at length with startling abruptness into a large circle of dazzling light. Four great fires were burning close together, and round them, motionless and for the most part silent, in appearance almost apathetic, stood hundreds of dark shadows—men and women waiting for news.
The silence and inaction of so large a crowd struck a chill to Lindo’s heart. When he recovered himself, he was standing in the midst of a dozen rough fellows, some half-stripped, some muffled up in pilot-jackets or coarse shiny clothes. The crowd seemed to be watching them, and they spoke now and then to one another in a desultory expectant fashion, from which he judged they were in authority.
“It is a bad job—a very bad job!” his companion was saying nervously. “Is there anything I can do yet?”
“Well, that depends, doctor,” answered one of the men, his manner of speaking proving that he was not a mere working collier. “There is no one up yet,” he added, eyeing the doctor dubiously. “But it does not exactly follow that you can do nothing. Some of us have just come up, and there is a shift of men exploring down there now. Three bodies have been recovered, and they are at the foot of the shaft; and three poor fellows have been found alive, of whom one has since died. The other two are within fifty yards of the shaft, and as comfortable as we can make them. But they are bad—too bad to come up in a bucket; and we can rig up nothing bigger at present so there they are fixed. The question is, will you go down to them?”
Mr. Keogh’s face fell, and he shook his head. He was no longer young, and to descend a sheer depth of five hundred yards in a bucket dangling at the end of a makeshift rope was not in his line. “No, thank you,” he said, “I could not do it.”
“Come, doctor,” the man persisted—he was the manager of a neighboring colliery—“you will be there in no time.”
“Just so,” said the surgeon drily. “It is the coming back is the rub, you see, Mr. Peat. No, thank you, I could not.”
The other still urged him. “These poor fellows are about as bad as they can be, and you know if the mountain will not go to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain.”
“I know; and if it were a mountain, well and good,” Mr. Keogh answered, smiling in sickly fashion as his eye strayed to a black well-like hole close at hand—a mere hole in some loose planks surmounted by a windlass and fringed with ugly wreckage. “But it is not. It is quite the other thing, you see.”
Mr. Peat, the manager, shrugged his shoulders, and glanced at his companions rather in sorrow than surprise. Lindo, standing behind the doctor, saw the look. Till then he had stood silent. Now he pressed forward. “Did I hear you say that one of the injured men died after he was found?” he asked.