Sir George Tressady Volume Ii Part 40

"Are you fit?" he said shortly.

Burrows flushed. Tressady's penetrating look forced his own to meet it.

"As fit as you are," was his haughty reply.

"Well"--said Tressady, slowly, "we don't want to be refusing strong men.

If Madan'll have you, you shall come. Mind, we're all under his orders."

He went to the manager, and said a word in his ear. Madan, in response, vouchsafed neither look nor remark to the man, whom he hated apparently more bitterly than his employer did. But he made no further objection to his joining the search party.

Presently all preparations were made. Picked bands of firemen and timbermen descended first, with Madan at their head. Then George, Mr.

Dixon, a couple of local doctors who had hurried up to offer their services, and Burrows.

As they shot down into the darkness George was conscious of a strange exhilaration. Working on the indications given him by the first exploring party, his mind was alive with conjectures as to the cause of the accident, and with plans for dealing with the various obstacles that might occur. Never during these weeks of struggle and noise and objurgation had he felt so fit, so strenuous. At the bottom of the shaft he had even to remind himself, with a shudder, of the dead men who must be waiting for them in these blank depths.

For some little distance from the shaft nothing was to be seen that spoke of an explosion. Some lamps in the porch of the shaft and along the main roadway were burning as usual, and the "journey" of trucks, from which the "hookers-on" and engine-men had escaped at the first sign of danger, was standing laden in the entrance of the mine. The door of the under-manager's cabin, near the base of the shaft, was open. Madan looked into the little den, where the lamp was still burning on the wall, and groaned. The young fellow who was generally to be found there was a great friend of his, and they attended the same chapel together. A little farther an open cupboard was noticed with a wisp of spun yarn hanging out from it--inflammable stuff, quite untouched. But about thirty yards farther they came upon the first signs of mischief. A heavy fall of roof had to be scrambled over, and beyond it afterdamp was clearly perceptible.

Here there was an exclamation from Burrows, who was to the front, and the first victim showed out of the dark in the pale glow-worm light of the lamps turned upon him. A man lay on his side, close against the wall, with an unlocked lamp in his hands, which were badly burnt. But no other part of him was burnt, and it was clear that he had died of afterdamp in trying to escape. He had evidently come from one of the nearer work-places, and fallen within a few yards of safety. The inspector pounced upon the lamp at once, while the doctors knelt by the body. But in itself the lamp told little. If it were the illegal unlocking of a lamp that caused the disaster, neither this lamp nor this man could be at fault; for he had died clearly on the verge of the explosion area, and from the after-effects of the calamity. But the inspector, who had barely looked at the dead man, turned the lamp round in his hands, dissatisfied.

"Bad pattern! bad pattern! If I had my way I'd fine every manager whose lamps _could_ be unlocked," he said to himself, but quite audibly.

"The fireman may have unlocked it, sir, to re-light his own or someone else's," said Madan, stiffly, put at once on his defence.

"Oh! I know you're within your legal right, Mr. Madan," said the inspector, briskly. "_I_ haven't the making of the laws."

And he sat down on the floor, taking the lamp to pieces, and bending his shrewd, black-eyed face over it, all the time that the doctors were examining its owner. He was, perhaps, one of the most humane men in his profession, but a long experience had led him to the conclusion that in these emergencies the fragments of a lamp, or a "tamping," or a "shot,"

matter more to the community than dead men.

Meanwhile George crouched beside the doctors, watching them. The owner of the lamp was a strong, fair-haired young man, without a mark on him except for the burning of the hands, the eyes quietly shut, the face at peace. One of the colliers in the search party had burst out crying when he saw him. The lad was his nephew, and had been a favourite in the pit, partly because of his prowess as a football player. But the young life had gone out irrevocably. The doctor shook his head as he lifted himself, and they left him there, in order not to waste any chance of getting out the living first.

Twenty yards farther on three more bodies were found, two oldish men and a boy, very little burnt. They also had been killed in escaping, dragged down by the inexorable afterdamp.

A little beyond this group a fall of mingled stone and coal from the roof blocked the way so heavily that the hewers and timbermen had to be set to work to open out and sh.o.r.e up before a pa.s.sage could be made. Meanwhile the air in the haulage road was clearing fast, and George could sit on a lump of stone and watch the dim light playing on the figures of the men at work. The blows struck echoed from floor to roof; the work of the bare arms and backs, as they swayed and jerked, woke a clamour in the mine.

Were there any ears still to listen for them beyond that ma.s.s? He could scarcely keep a limb quiet, as he sat looking on, for impatience and excitement. Burrows meanwhile was wielding a pick with the rest, and George envied him the bodily skill and strength that, in spite of his irregular ways of life, were still left to him.

To restore the ventilation-current was their first object, and the foremost pick had no sooner gained the roadway on the other side than a strong movement of the air was perceptible. Madan's face cleared. The ventilation circuit between the downcast and upcast shafts must be already in some sort re-established. Let them only get a few more "stoppings" and brattices put temporarily to rights, and the fan, working at its increased speed, would soon drive the renewed air-currents forward again, and make it possible to get all over the mine. The hole made was quickly enlarged, and the rescuers scrambled through.

But still fall after fall on the further side delayed their progress, and the work of repairing the blown-out stoppings by such wood brattice as could be got at, was long and tedious. The rescuers toiled and sweated, pausing every now and then to draw upon the food and drink sent up from behind; and the hours flew unheeded. At last, upon the further side of one of the worst of these falls--a loose mingled ma.s.s of rock and coal--they came on indications that showed them they had reached the centre and heart of the disaster. A door leading on the right to one of the side-roads of the pit known as Holford's Heading was blown outwards, and some trucks from the heading had been dashed across the main intake, and piled up in a huddled and broken ma.s.s against the farther wall. Just inside that door lay victim after victim, mostly on their faces, poor fellows! as they had come running out from their stalls at the noise of the explosion, only to meet the fiery blast that killed them. Two or three had been flung violently against the sides of the heading, and were left torn, with still bleeding wounds, as well as charred and blackened by the flame. Of sixteen men and boys that lay in this place of death, not one had survived to hear the stifled words--half groans, half sobs, of the comrades who had found them.

"But, thank G.o.d! no torture, no _thought_," said George to himself as he went from face to face; "an instant--a flash--then nothingness."

Many of the men were well known to him. He had seen them last hanging about the village street, pale with famine--the hatred in their eyes pursuing him.

He knelt down an instant beside an elderly man whom he could remember since he was quite a boy--a weak-eyed, sallow fellow, much given to preaching--much given, too, it was said, to beating his wife and children, as the waves of excitement took him. Anyway, a fellow who could feel, whose nerves stung and tormented him, even in the courses of ordinary life. He lay with his eyes half open, the face terribly scorched, the hands clenched, as though he still fought with the death that had overcome him.

George covered the man's face with a handkerchief as the doctor left the body. "_He_ suffered," he said, under his breath. The doctor heard him, and nodded sadly.

Hark! What was that? A cry--a faint cry!

"They're some of them alive in the end workings," cried Madan, with a sob of joy. "Come on, my lads! come on!"

And the party--all but Mr. Dixon--leaving the dead, pushed on through the foul atmosphere, over heaps of fallen stone and coal, in quest of the living.

"Leave me a man," said Mr. Dixon, detaining the manager a moment. "I stay here. You have enough with you. If I judge right, it all began here."

A collier stayed with him, unwillingly, panting all the time under the emotion of the rescue the man imagined but was not to see.

For while the inspector measured and sketched, far up the heading, in some disused workings off a side-dip or roadway, Burrows was the first to come upon twenty-five men, eighteen of whom were conscious and uninjured.

Two of them had strength enough, as they heard the footsteps and shouts approaching, to stagger out into the heading to meet their rescuers. One, a long, thin lad, came forward with leaps and gambols, in spite of his weakness, and fell almost at Tressady's feet. As he recognised the tall man standing above him, his bloodless mouth twitched into a broad grin.

"I say, give us a chance. Take me out--won't you?"

It was Mary Batchelor's grandson. In retribution for the a.s.sault on Letty the lad had been sentenced to three weeks' imprisonment, and George had not seen him since. He stooped now, and poured some brandy down the boy's throat. "We'll get you out directly," he said, "as soon as we've looked to the others."

"There's some on 'em not worth takin out," said the boy, clinging to George's leg. "They're dead. Take me out first." Then, with another grin, as George disengaged himself, "Some on em's prayin."

Indeed, the first sight of that little group was a strange and touching one. About a dozen men sat huddled round one of their number, a Wesleyan cla.s.s-leader, who had been praying with them and reciting pa.s.sages from St. John. All of them, young or old, were dazed and bent from the effects of afterdamp, and scarcely one of them had strength to rise till they were helped to their feet. Nevertheless, the cry which had been heard by their rescuers had not been a cry for help, but the voices of the little prayer-meeting raised feebly through the darkness in the Old Hundredth.

A little distance from the prayer-meeting, the sceptics of the party leant against the wall or lay along the floor, unheeding; while seven men were unconscious, and possibly dying. Two or three young fellows meanwhile, who had been least touched by the afterdamp, had "amused themselves," as they said, by riding up and down the neighbouring level on the "jummer" or coal-truck of one of them.

"Weren't you afraid?" Tressady asked one of these, turning a curious look at him, while the doctors were examining the worst cases, and rough men were sobbing and shaking each other's hands off.

"Noa," said the young hewer, his face, like something cut out in yellowish wax, returning the light from Tressady's lamp. "Noa, theer was c.u.mpany. Old Moses, there--ee saved us."

Old Moses was the leader of the prayer-meeting. He was a fireman besides, who had been for twenty-six years in the mine. At the time of the explosion, it appeared, he had been in a working close to that door on the heading where death had done so ghastly and complete a work. But the flame in its caprice had pa.s.sed him by, and he and another man had been able to struggle through the afterdamp back along the heading, just in time to stem the rush of men and boys from the workings at the farther end. These men were at the moment in a madness of terror, and ready even to plunge into the white death-mist advancing to meet them, obeying only the instinct of the trapped animal to "get out." But Moses was able to control them, to draw them back by degrees along the heading till, in the distant workings where they were found, the air was more tolerable, and they could wait for rescue.

George was the first to help the old fireman to his feet. But instead of listening to any praises of his own conduct, he was no sooner clinging to Tressady's arm than he called to Madan:

"Mr. Madan, sir!"

"Aye, Moses."

"Have ye heard aught of them in the West Heading yet?"

"No, Moses; we must get these fellows out first. We'll go there next."

"I left thirty men and boys there this morning at half-past six. It was fair thronged up with them." The old man's voice shook.

Meanwhile Madan and the doctors were busy with the transport of the seven unconscious men, some of whom were already dying. Each of them had to be carried on his back by two men, and as soon as the sick procession was organised it was seen that only three of the search party were left free--Tressady, Burrows, and the Scotch fireman, Macgregor.

Up the level and along the heading, past the point where Dixon was still at work, over the minor falls that everywhere attested the range of the explosion, and through the pools of water that here and there gathered the drippings of the mine, the seven men were tenderly dragged or carried, till at last the party regained the main intake or roadway.

George turned to Madan.

"You will have your hands full with these poor fellows. Macgregor and I--Mr. Burrows, if he likes--will push on to the West Heading."

Madan looked uneasy.