The Trey o' Hearts/Chapter 43
CHAPTER XLIII
Jaws of Death
AWAKENING befell Mr. Barcus in a fashion sufficiently startling to render him indifferent to the beneficial effects of some eight hours of dreamless slumber.
He discovered himself lying flat on his face, with somebody's heavy hand purposefully grinding the said face into the planks of the shed flooring. At the same time other hands were busy binding his own together by the wrists, and lashing them to the small of his back by means of cord passed round his middle, while his natural efforts to kick were hampered by the fact that his ankles had already been secured.
His hands attended to, his head was released. Promptly he lifted it and essayed a yell, an effort rendered abortive by the gag that was thrust between his teeth the instant his jaws opened. After which—barring a gratuitous kick in the ribs—he was left to his own devices.
They were limited, in the beginning, to resting as he was and listening. Sounds of retreating footsteps were all that rewarded him. Then he heard a cold and mirthless chuckle, from some considerable distance, and calculated that he who laughed was some place in the clearing.
Now the blood of Thomas Barcus ran cold (or he thought it did, which amounts to much the same thing). For if his senses had played fair, the laugh he had heard was the laugh of Mr. Marrophat.
He twisted his head to one side and saw nothing but the wall. Twisting the other way, his effort was repaid by the discovery of Rose Trine in plight like unto his own—wrists and ankles bound, gagged into the bargain—the width of the shed between them.
But of Alan Law no sign. …
Tormented beyond endurance by the fears he suffered for the safety of his friend, he began painfully inching his way across the floor toward Rose, with what design, Heaven alone knows!
He had contrived to bridge the distance by half when a dark body put the sunlight of the open doorway into temporary eclipse. Another followed it. Boots clumped heavily on the flooring. Two pairs of hands seized him, one beneath the shoulders, the other beneath the knees, and he was lugged out into the sunlight, carried a considerable distance, and deposited within a few feet of the mouth of the abandoned mine just at the moment when he had satisfied himself that the purpose of his captors was to throw him into that black well.
Then he was left to himself once more, but only for a few moments: the interval ended when the two appeared again, this time bringing Rose in similar fashion. Not until she had been put down beside him did he discover that Alan was likewise a captive, trussed to a tree at some distance.
The remaining arrangements of their captors were swiftly and deftly consummated. He, after Rose, was dumped like a bale into a huge bucket, and therein by means of rope and windlass lowered to the bottom of the shaft—a descent of something like a hundred feet.
Marrophat operated the windlass, his first assistant (a boyish body never known to Barcus by any other name than Jimmy) having accompanied Rose down the shaft and waiting there to receive and dispose of Barcus and Alan in turn.
His handling of them was much like the treatment a sincere baggage-smasher accords an exceptionally heavy trunk. Barcus was partly dragged, partly thrown, tumbled, and kicked, some ten feet or so along a tunnel that struck away from the foot of the shaft, then left shoulder to shoulder with Rose, in darkness only emphasized by the feeble flicker of a candle which Jimmy had thrust into the wall of the tunnel near its mouth, while Alan was lowered, brought in, and thrown roughly down across the body of Barcus.
A hideous screeching followed, the protests of rusty and greaseless machinery. Twisting his neck, Barcus saw the dim opening of the shaft slowly closing, as if a curtain were being drawn down over it. Jimmy was closing the bulkhead door, leaving them definitely prisoners, beyond human aid.
The silence was broken by Alan's voice:
"Barcus!"
The latter grunted by way of answer, he could do no more.
"I've worked my gag loose," Alan pursued, "but my hands are tied behind my back. Are yours? Grunt once for 'yes.'"
Dutifully Barcus grunted a solitary grunt.
"Then roll over on your face and give me a chance at your bonds with my teeth."
Barcus wasted no time in obeying Alan's suggestion—then lay for upward of ten minutes with his face in the mould of the tunnel while Alan chewed and spat and chewed again at the ropes round the wrists of his friend.
It seemed upward of an hour before the bonds grew slack and Barcus worried a hand free, then loosed the other, removed his gag, and set hastily about freeing his friend. That took but a few instants—little more than was needed to rid Rose of her bonds.
That much accomplished, a pause of consternation followed. The darkness was absolute in the tunnel, Jimmy having taken the candle away with him. Barcus had turned to the bulkhead and was, without the slightest hope, groping about its joints and crevices in search of some way of forcing it. …
"Barcus, old man, did you notice what that blackguard had fixed up?"
"What do you mean?"
"Why—at the bottom of the shaft—I got only a glimpse coming in—the door of the powder-room was open, and I saw a fuse set to the top of a keg of blasting powder. …"
"What's the good of that? We're fast enough as it is!"
"Simply to make assurance doubly sure by causing a cave-in. …"
"Why the deuce doesn't he set off his explosion if he means to?"
"Heaven only knows. Perhaps he's thought of some scheme more devilish. Perhaps he set the stage with an empty powder-keg simply to drive us mad with the strain of waiting. …"
"I wouldn't put that by h»m, either," Barcus commented. "See here, what do you know about mines?"
"Next to nothing."
"Then you've got little on me. But I seem to remember hearing or reading, some place, that tunnels have two ends. If that's true, the far end of this ought to be the safest place when that explosion happens."
"Something in that!"
"Got any matches?" Barcus inquired.
"Never one."
"Nor I. We'll have to feel our way along. Let me lead. If I step over the brink of a pit or anything, I'll try to yell and warn you in time."
Alan caught his friend's hand and pressed it warmly, a caress eloquent of his gratitude to Barcus for taking their peril lightly, or pretending to, for the sake of Rose.
A ticklish business, that—groping their way through blackness so opaque that it seemed palpable. An elbow in the tunnel—sensed rather than felt or seen—cut them off from direct communication with the bulkhead, and at the same time opened up a shaft of daylight striking down through that pitchy darkness like a column of gold.
Cries of joy choking in their throats, they gained the spot immediately below the shaft, and looked up dazzled, to see blue sky, like a coin of Heaven's minting, far above them, at the end of a long and almost perpendicular tunnel, wide enough to permit the passage of a man's body, and lined with wooden ladders.
The end of the lowermost ladder hung within easy reach from the floor of the tunnel. But even as Alan lifted his hands to grasp the bottom rung, the opening at the top of the shaft was temporarily obscured.
Thrilled with apprehension, he hesitated, Marrophat was up there, he little doubted; it was hardly like that fiend to overlook the ladder-shaft in preparing the tunnel to be a living tomb.
Marrophat or no Marrophat at the top, there was nothing for him to do but to grasp the ladder with a steady hand. Even though he were shot dead on emerging from the shaft, it were better than to die down there. …
He had climbed not more than half a dozen rungs when a few drops of water spattered his fact, like heavy rain. Almost immediately the blue sky was permanently eclipsed, a cascade of water, almost a solid column, shot down the shaft with terrific force. Alan sought vainly to escape it, to mount against it. Before he knew it, his grasp had been wrenched away from the ladders and he was shooting feet first back into the tunnel.
Half drowned, he felt himself dragged out of the waterfall. Then he comprehended the fact that the tunnel was already filling; that, where they stood, it was already ankle-deep, while the water continued to fall without hint of let-up.