Part 22 (1/2)

By this time they had effected an entrance into the shed, the door of which was securely locked, while the boards of one entire side of the tumble-down structure swung in at a touch. The three men stood looking down the pitch black hole into which the rope disappeared.

”Looks kind of pokey, doesn't it?” said Allery Jones. ”Think you'd better try it, Fetherbee?”

For answer, Mr. Fetherbee seized the lightly swinging rope with both hands, twisted one leg about it and slid gaily from sight.

”_Bon voyage!_” called Dayton, down the inky shaft.

”_Yage!_” came a hollow voice from the reverberating depths. They felt of the rope which was taut and firm.

”He's all right,” said Dayton. ”There's not enough of him to get hurt,”

and he squeezed his portly person out between the flapping boards.

”All the same, I shall be glad to see him again,” Jones declared, with an anxious frown upon his usually _nonchalant_ countenance; and the two men started briskly down the hill in pursuit of ”the team.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Fetherbee was making his way slowly and cautiously down the rope. It was a good stout one and he had no real misgivings. Yet the situation was unusual enough to have a piquant flavor. In the first place the darkness was more than inky in character, the kind of blackness in comparison with which the blackest night seems luminous.

Then there was the peculiar quality of the air, so different from anything above ground, that the words chill, and dampness, had no special relation to it. In the strange, tomb-like silence, his own breath, his own movements, waked a ghostly, whispering echo which was extremely weird and suggestive. Mr. Fetherbee was enchanted. He felt that he was getting down into the mysterious heart of things; that he was having something which came within an ace of being an adventure.

Then, as he felt his way down, farther and farther below the vain surface of things, that intervening ace vanished, and he came up against his adventure with a suddenness that sent a knife-like thrill to his heart. His foot had lost its hold of the rope; he was hanging by his hands only.

Startled into what he condemned as an unreasoning agitation, he began describing a circle with his leg, searching for the lost rope. It must be there, of course; why, of course it must! He had certainly not gone more than fifty or sixty feet, and they had said something about three hundred feet? Where could the rope be? It must have got caught somehow on his coat! Or perhaps his right leg was getting numb and he could not feel anything with it. But no! His leg was all right. He felt out with his left leg. It did not even touch the wall of the shaft. There seemed to be nothing there, nothing at all! Nothing there? Nothing in all the universe, but this bit of rope he was clutching, and himself, a miserable little lump of quivering, straining nerves.

Mr. Fetherbee told himself that this would never do. He loosed the grip of his left hand, and it felt its way slowly down the rope gathering it up inch by inch. He knew by the lightness of the rope that the end was there, yet when he touched it a s.h.i.+ver went through him. A second later the left hand was clutching the rope beside the right, and he had taken a long breath of,--was it relief? Relief from uncertainty, at least. He knew with a positive knowledge that there was but one outcome for the situation. It would be an hour at the very least before his friends reached the tunnel, for Dis...o...b.. had business to attend to on the way.

Even then they might not conclude immediately that anything was amiss.

The break in the rope must be recent. It was possible that no one in the mine had discovered it. The old shaft was never used now-a-days, except for just such chance excursions as his. One thing was sure,--he could never hold out an hour. Already his wrists were weakening; he was getting chilled too, now that motion had ceased. He gave himself twenty minutes at the most, and then?--Hm! He wondered what it would be like!

He had heard that people falling from a great height had the breath knocked out of them before they--arrived! He was afraid three hundred feet was not high enough for that! What a pity the shaft was not a thousand feet deep! What a pity it had any bottom at all!

”I should have liked a chance to tell Louisa,” he said aloud, with a short, nervous laugh, and then,--he was himself again.

To say that Mr. Fetherbee was himself again is to say that he was a self-possessed and plucky little gentleman,--the same gallant little gentleman, dangling here at the end of a rope, with the steady, irresistible force of gravitation pulling him to his doom, as he had ever been in his gay, debonair progress through a safe and friendly world. He forced his thoughts away from the horror to come. His imagination could be kept out of that yawning horror, though his body must be inevitably drawn down into it as by a thousand clutching hands.

He forced his thoughts back to the pleasant, prosperous life he had led; to the agreeable people he had known; and most tenderly, most warmly, he thought of Louisa,--Louisa, so kind, so sympathetic, so companionable.

”Louisa,” he had said to her one day, ”I not only love you, but I like you.” Well, so it had been with his life, that pleasant life of his. He not only loved it but he liked it! As he looked back over its course, in a spirit of calm contemplation, the achievement of which he did not consider in the least heroic, he came to the deliberate conclusion that he had had his share. After a little more consideration his mind, with but a quickly suppressed recoil, adopted the conviction that it was perhaps better to go suddenly like this, than to have been subjected to a long, lingering illness.

His wrists were becoming more and more weak and shaky, and there was a sense of emptiness within him, natural perhaps, considering the quality of his noon-day meal. His thoughts began to hover, with a curious bitterness over the memory of that apricot pie. It was the one thing that interfered with the even tenor of his philosophical reflections.

The most singular resentment toward it had taken possession of his mind.

”Look here,” he said to himself; ”I'll get my mind clear of that confounded pie, and then I'll drop and have done with it.” He knew very well that he could not keep his hold two minutes longer, and he was determined to ”die game.”

For a few seconds Mr. Fetherbee very nearly lost his mental grip. It seemed to be loosening, loosening, just as his fingers were doing. Then, as in a sort of trance, there rose before him a visible picture of the pleasant, kindly face he had so warmly loved, so heartily liked. Still in a trance-like condition, he became aware that that was the impression he would like to carry with him into eternity. He let it sink quietly into his soul, a soothing, fortifying draught; then, unconscious of philosophy, of heroism, of whatever we may choose to call the calm acceptance of the inevitable, he loosed his hold.

He fell of course only three inches. Anybody might have foreseen it, anybody, that is, who had not been suspended at the end of a rope in a pitch black hole. There is, however, something more convincing in experience than in anything else, and, as we have seen, Mr. Fetherbee had not once thought of the possibility of a friendly platform close beneath his feet. The discovery of it was none the less exhilarating. He did not in the least understand it, but he was entirely ready to believe in it.

He promptly pulled out his match-box and the bit of candle he was provided with. The dim, uncertain light cheered and warmed his very soul.

He found himself standing on a broad stout plank, built securely across the shaft. From the under side of this plank hung a rope like the one gently swaying before his eyes. He was saved; and as he breathed something very like a prayer of thanksgiving, it suddenly struck him that he had escaped not only an untimely, but an undignified end. ”I'm glad I haven't done anything to mortify Louisa,” he said to himself, and he felt that he had not until that moment appreciated his good fortune!

He looked at his watch. It was nearly half-an-hour since he had entered the mine. He stamped his feet on the plank and rubbed his hands together to get up the circulation, and then he pulled out a cigar and lighted it. The first whiff permeated his being with a sense as of food and drink, suns.h.i.+ne and sweet air.