"Course He will," responded this dignified, blessed young matron born and bred in Boston.
"Come," said Catherine, rousing herself from the thoughtful mood which had gripped her, after the first excitement of Felton's revelation was over. "We haven't half explored this place. Who knows but there's a barrel of flour stowed away in some dark corner."
"Behind this door—for example," said Felton, entering into his wife's mood, and glad for any little diversion to check thought and imagination.
There had been standing against the wall in one dark corner of the room an old door, evidently brought in from some outhouse for the repairing of its hinges. It had not been disturbed since the new occupancy of the place. Felton grasped the pineplanks in both hands and set them to one side. There semi-gleaming in the candlelight hung revealed one of the two business ends of the common place and eminently valuable telephone of North America.
Felton gasped and then sat down backwards on the floor. "Holy smoke," was all he said.
Catherine came running to the half dazed man but for a little time he said nothing. He was thinking. He remembered suddenly that there was a telephone between the mine and the nearest town in the valley, that to which the miners had fled. Of course the line was deep beneath the snow, part of the way, but it might be working. He looked at his wife in a dazed way, clambered to his feet and took hold of the receiver.
"Don't be disappointed," said Catherine, "if it doesn't work. We shall be saved somehow."
"Hello!" shouted Felton, into the familiar, waiting 'phone.
The dazed wife stood by in the silence which ensued, saying nothing.
Moment after moment passed and there came no answer. Still the man stood there repeating at intervals of four or five minutes the hopeless word, the call "Hello". Suddenly he upreared himself, laughed somewhat wildly, and applied his lips to the transmitter.