The rescuers led the imprisoned miners down the dark passage; Grant Adams was the last man to leave the prison. As he turned an angle of the passage, a great rock fell crashing before him, and a head of dirt caught him and dragged him under. His legs and body were pinioned. Dennis Hogan in front heard the crash, saw Grant fall, and stood back for a moment, as another huge rock slid slowly down and came to rest above the prostrate man. For a second no one moved. Then one man–Ira Dooley–slowly crept toward Grant and began digging with his hands at the dirt around Grant’s legs. Then Casper Herdicker and Chopini came to help. As they stood at Grant’s head, quick as a flash, the rock fell and the two men standing at Grant’s head were crushed like worms. The roof of the passage was working wickedly, and in the flickering light of the lanterns they could see the walls shudder. Then Dick Bowman stepped out. He brought a shovel from a room opening on the passage, and Evan Davis and Tom Williams and Jamey McPherson with shovels began working over Grant, who lay white and frightened, watching the squirming wall above and blowing the dropping dirt from his face as it fell.
“Mugs, come here,” called Dick Bowman. “Take that shovel,” commanded the father, “and hold it over Grant’s face to keep the dirt from smothering him.” The boy looked in terror at the roof dropping dirt and ready to fall, but the father glared at the son and he obeyed. No one spoke, but four men worked–all that could stand about him. They dug out his body; they released his legs, they freed his feet, and when he was free they helped him up and hurried him down the passage which he had traversed four days ago. Before they turned into the main bottom room, he was sick with the stench. And as he turned into that room, where the cage landed, he saw by the lantern lights and by 178the flaring torches held by a dozen men, a great congregation of the dead–some piled upon others, some in attitudes of prayer, some shielding their comrades in death, some fleeing and stricken prone upon the floor, some sitting, looking the foe in the face. Men were working with the bodies–trying to sort them into a kind of order; but the work had just begun.
The weakened men, led by their rescuers, picked their way through the corpses and went to the top in a cage. Far down in the shaft, the daylight cut them like a knife. And as they mounted higher and higher, they could hear the murmur of voices above them, and Grant could hear the sobs of women and children long before he reached the top. The word that men had been rescued passed out of the shaft house before they could get out of the cage, and a great shout went up.
The men walked out of the shaft house and saw all about them, upon flat cars, upon the dump near the shaft, upon buildings around the shaft house, a great crowd of cheering men and women, pale, drawn, dreadful faces, illumined by eager eyes. Grant lifted his eyes to the crowd. There in a carriage beside Henry Fenn, Grant saw Margaret staring at him, and saw her turn pale and slide down into her husband’s arms, as she recognized Grant’s face among those who had come out of death. Then he saw his father and little Kenyon in the crowd and he dashed through the thick of it to them. There he held the boy high in the air, and cried as the little arms clung about his neck.
The great hoarse whistles roared and the shrill siren whistles screamed and the car bells clanged and the church bells rang. But they did not roar and scream and peal and toll for money and wealth and power, but for life that was returned. As for the army of the dead below, for all their torture, for all their agony and the misery they left behind for society to heal or help or neglect–the army of the dead had its requiem that New Year’s eve, when the bells and whistles and sirens clamored for money that brings wealth, and wealth that brings power, and power that brings pleasure, and pleasure that brings death–and death?–and death?
179The town had met death. But no one even in that place of mourning could answer the question that the child heard in the bells. And yet that divine spark of heroism that burns unseen in every heart however high, however low–that must be the faltering, uncertain light which points us to the truth across the veil through the mists made by our useless tears.
And thus a New Year in Harvey began its long trip around the sun, with its sorrows and its joys, with its merry pantomime and its mutes mourning upon the hearse, with its freight of cares and compensations and its sad ironies. So let us get on and ride and enjoy the journey.
180CHAPTER XVII
A CHAPTER WHICH INTRODUCES SOME POSSIBLE GODS
When Grant Adams had told and retold his story to the reporters and had eaten what Dr. Nesbit would let him eat, it was late in the afternoon. He lay down to sleep with the sun still shining through the shutters in his low-ceiled, west bed room. Through the night his father sat or slept fitfully beside him and when the morning sun was high, and still the young man slept on, the father guarded him, and would let no one enter the house. At noon Grant rose and dressed. He saw the Dexters coming down the road and he went to the door to welcome them. It seemed at first that the stupor of sleep was not entirely out of his brain. He was silent and had to be primed for details of his adventure. He sat down to eat, but when his meal was half finished, there came bursting out of his soul a flame of emotion, and he put down his food, turned half around from the table, grasped the edges of the board with both hands and cried as a fanatic who sees a vision: