Old Rafe Peters shook his head. He was keeping his eyes on the buckets of “rubbage,” as he called it, that were being swiftly brought to the surface by the steam winch. He had excavated the lower end of the shaft himself and he knew the strata of earth through which it passed. By the colour of that which came up in the buckets, he knew the diggers had not gone far as yet.
One bucket went down as the other came up. It was not down three minutes before the signal rang for it to be hoisted again. But thousands upon thousands of buckets of debris would have to be hoisted out of the shaft ere the way would be opened into tunnel Number Two, lower level, in which Mr. Havens and the miners were entombed.
CHAPTER III—THE LAME INDIAN
The five men shut in the mine with Chet’s father were all married and their wives and children made the noisiest group of all at the mouth of the Silent Sue mine. The rough men standing about tried to comfort them; but there was not much of a comforting nature to say.
There were plenty of men for the work of rescue; indeed, there were so many in each two-hour shift that they got in each other’s way. Chet Havens had put the situation concisely and to the point: It would take more than a week to dig down to the opening of Number Two tunnel; meanwhile, how would the entombed miners live without food or water?
Mr. Fordham had not returned and there was nobody for the two boys to confer with. The mine foreman was doing all that seemed possible. It was a question whether what he did was of much use.
Six men in a stoppered tunnel, with no ventilation and nothing to eat or drink, were not going to live long. Chet doubted if any of them would be alive at the week’s end.
“Wait till father comes,” Dig said, almost sobbing, and seeing how badly his chum felt. “Perhaps he’ll know some other way to get into that drift.”
“What way?” demanded Chet. “He doesn’t know any more about the mine than we do.”
“Maybe from the old upper level—”