Gordon Keith Part 57

"I can't," said Bluffy. "I'm hurt. My leg is broke."

"G.o.d have mercy!" cried Keith, and waded on.

After a moment more he was up with the man, feeling for him in the darkness, and asking how he was hurt.

They told him that the rush of the water had thrown him against a timber and hurt his leg and side.

"Take the boy," said Bluffy, "and go on; leave me here."

The boy began to cry.

"No," said Keith; "I will take you, too: Hennson can take the boy. Can you walk at all?"

"I don't think so."

Keith made Hennson take the boy and hold on to him on one side, and slipping his arm around the injured man, he lifted him and they started back. He had put new courage into them, and the force of the current was in their favor. They pa.s.sed the first high level, where he had found the others. When they reached a point where the water was too deep for the boy, Keith made the father take him on his shoulder, and they waded on through the blackness. The water was now almost up to his chin, and he grew so tired under his burden that he began to think they should never get out; but he fought against it and kept on, steadying himself against the timbers. He knew that if he went down it was the end. Many thoughts came to him of the past. He banished them and tried to speak words of encouragement, though he could scarcely hear himself.

"Shout," he said hoa.r.s.ely; and the boy shouted, though it was somewhat feeble.

A moment later, he gave a shout of an entirely different kind.

"There is a light!" he cried.

The sound revived Keith's fainting energies, and he tried to muster his flagging strength. The boy shouted again, and in response there came back, strangely flattened, the shrill cry of a woman. Keith staggered forward with Bluffy, at times holding himself up by the side-timbers. He was conscious of a light and of voices, but was too exhausted to know more. If he could only keep the man and the boy above water until a.s.sistance came! He summoned his last atom of strength.

"Hold tight to the timbers, Hennson," he cried; "I am going."

The rest was a confused dream. He was conscious for a moment of the weight being lifted from him, and he was sinking into the water as if into a soft couch. He thought some one clutched him, but he knew nothing more.

Terpsich.o.r.e was out on the street when the rumor of the accident reached her. Any accident always came home to her, and she was prompt to do what she could to help, in any case. But this was Mr. Keith's mine, and rumor had it that he was among the lost. Terpsich.o.r.e was not attired for such an emergency; when she went on the streets, she still wore some of her old finery, though it was growing less and less of late. She always acted quickly. Calling to a barkeeper who had come to his front door on hearing the news, to bring her brandy immediately, she dashed into a dry-goods store near by and got an armful of blankets, and when the clerk, a stranger just engaged in the store, made some question about charging them to her, she tore off her jewelled watch and almost flung it at the man.

"Take that, idiot! Men are dying," she said. "I have not time to box your jaws." And s.n.a.t.c.hing up the blankets, she ran out, stopped a pa.s.sing buggy, and flinging them into it, sprang in herself. With a nod of thanks to the barkeeper, who had brought out several bottles of brandy, she s.n.a.t.c.hed the reins from the half-dazed driver, and heading the horse up the street that led out toward the mine, she lashed him into a gallop. She arrived at the scene of the accident just before the first men rescued reappeared. She learned of Keith's effort to save them. She would have gone into the mine herself had she not been restrained. Just then the men came out.

The shouts and cries of joy that greeted so unexpected a deliverance drowned everything else for a few moments; but as man after man was met and received half dazed into the arms of his family and friends, the name of Keith began to be heard on all sides. One voice, however, was more imperative than the others; one figure pressed to the front--that of the gayly dressed woman who had just been comforting and encouraging the weeping women about the mine entrance.

"Where is Mr. Keith?" she demanded of man after man.

The men explained. "He went on to try and find three more men who are down there--Bluffy and Hennson and his boy."

"Who went with him?"

"No one. He went alone."

"And you men let him go?"

"We could not help it. He insisted. We tried to make him come with us."

"You cowards!" she cried, tearing off her wrap. "Of course, he insisted, for he is a _man_. Had one woman been down there, she would not have let him go alone." She sprang over the fencing rope as lightly as a deer, and started toward the entrance. A cry broke from the crowd.

"She's going! Stop her! She's crazy! Catch her!"

Several men sprang over the rope and started after her. Hearing them, Terpsich.o.r.e turned. With outstretched arms spread far apart and blazing eyes, she faced them.

"If any man tries to stop me, I will kill him on the spot, as G.o.d lives!" she cried, s.n.a.t.c.hing up a piece of iron bar that lay near by. "I am going to find that man, dead or alive. If there is one of you man enough to come with me, come on. If not, I will go alone."

"I will go with you!" A tall, sallow-faced man who had just come up pushed through the throng and overtook her. "You stay here; I will go."

It was Tib Drummond, the preacher. He was still panting. The girl hardly noticed him. She waved him aside and dashed on.

A dozen men offered to go if she would come back.

"No; I shall go with you," she said; and knowing that every moment was precious, and thinking that the only way to pacify her was to make the attempt, the men yielded, and a number of them entered the mine with her, the lank preacher among them.

They had just reached the bottom when the faint outline of something black was seen in the glimmer that their lights threw in the distance.

Terpy, with a cry, dashed forward, and was just in time to catch Keith as he sank beneath the black water.

When the rescuing party with their burdens reached the surface once more, the scene was one to revive even a flagging heart; but Keith and Bluffy were both too far gone to know anything of it.

The crowd, which up to this time had been buzzing with the excitement of the reaction following the first rescue, suddenly hushed down to an awed silence as Keith and Bluffy were brought out and were laid limp and unconscious on a blanket, which Terpsich.o.r.e had s.n.a.t.c.hed from a man in the front of the others. Many women pressed forward to offer a.s.sistance, but the girl waved them back.

"A doctor!" she cried, and reaching for a brandy-bottle, she pressed it first to Keith's lips. Turning to Drummond, the preacher, who stood gaunt and dripping above her, she cried fiercely: "Pray, man; if you ever prayed, pray now. Pray, and if you save 'em, I'll leave town. I swear before G.o.d I will. Tell Him so."

But the preacher needed no urging. Falling on his knees, he prayed as possibly he had never prayed before. In a few moments Keith began to come to. But Bluffy was still unconscious, and a half-hour later the Doctor p.r.o.nounced him past hope.

It was some time before Keith was able to rise from his bed, and during this period a number of events had taken place affecting him, and, more or less, affecting New Leeds. Among these was the sale of Mr. Plume's paper to a new rival which had recently been started in the place, and the departure of Mr. Plume (to give his own account of the matter) "to take a responsible position upon a great metropolitan journal." He was not a man, he said, "to waste his divine talents in the attempt to carry on his shoulders the blasted fortunes of a 'bursted boom,' when the world was pining for the benefit of his ripe experience." Another account of the same matter was that rumor had begun to connect Mr.

Plume's name with the destruction of the Wickersham mine and the consequent disaster in the Rawson mine. His paper, with brazen effrontery, had declared that the accident in the latter was due to the negligence of the management. This was too much for the people of New Leeds in their excited condition. Bluffy was dead; but Hennson, the man whom Keith had rescued, had stated that they had cut through into a shaft when the water broke in on them, and an investigation having been begun, not only of this matter, but of the previous explosion in the Wickersham mine, Mr. Plume had sold out his paper hastily and shaken the dust of New Leeds from his feet.

Keith knew nothing of this until it was all over. He was very ill for a time, and but for the ministrations of Dr. Balsam, who came up from Ridgely to look after him, and the care of a devoted nurse in the person of Terpsich.o.r.e, this history might have ended then. Terpsich.o.r.e had, immediately after Keith's accident, closed her establishment and devoted herself to his care. There were many other offers of similar service, for New Leeds was now a considerable town, and Keith might have had a fair proportion of the gentler s.e.x to minister to him; but Dr. Balsam, to whom Terpsich.o.r.e had telegraphed immediately after Keith's rescue, had, after his first interview with her in the sick-room, decided in favor of the young woman.

"She has the true instinct," said the Doctor to himself. "She knows when to let well enough alone, and holds her tongue."

Thus, when Keith was able to take notice again, he found himself in good hands.

A few days after he was able to get up, Keith received a telegram summoning him to New York to meet the officers of the company. As weak as he was, he determined to go, and, against the protestations of doctor and nurse, he began to make his preparations.

Just before Keith left, a visitor was announced, or rather announced himself; for Squire Rawson followed hard upon his knock at the door. His heavy boots, he declared, "were enough to let anybody know he was around, and give 'em time to stop anything they was ashamed o' doin'."

The squire had come over, as he said, "to hear about things." It was the first time he had seen Keith since the accident, though, after he had heard of it, he had written and invited Keith to come "and rest up a bit at his house."

When the old man learned of the summons that had come to Keith, he relit his pipe and puffed a moment in silence.

"Reckon they'll want to know why they ain't been a realizin' of their dreams?" he said, with a twinkle in his half-shut eyes. "Ever notice, when a man is huntin', if he gits what he aims at, it's himself; but if he misses, it's the blamed old gun?"

Keith smiled. He had observed that phenomenon.