“What,” shouted Lockwood, “you think—think
that I—that I could—oh-h,
it’s monstrous—you——”
He could find no words to voice his loathing.
Swiftly he turned away from her, the last spark of
an evil love dying down forever in his breast.
It was a transformation, a thing as sudden as a miracle,
as conclusive as a miracle, and with all a miracle’s
sense of uplift and power. In a second of time
the scales seemed to fall from the man’s eyes,
fetters from his limbs; he saw, and he was free.
At the door Lockwood met the doctor:
“Well?”
“He’s all right; only a superficial wound.
He’ll recover. But you—how about
you? All right? Well, that is a good hearing.
You’ve had a lucky escape, my boy.”
“I have had a lucky escape,” shouted
Lockwood. “You don’t know just how
lucky it was.”
“Hey, youse!” shouted the car-boy.
He brought his trundling, jolting, loose-jointed car
to a halt by the face of the drift. “Hey,
youse!” he shouted again.
Bunt shut off the Burly air-drill and nodded.
“Chaw,” he remarked to me.
We clambered into the car, and, as the boy released
the brake, rolled out into the main tunnel of the
Big Dipple, and banged and bumped down the long incline
that led to the mouth.
“Chaw” was dinner. It was one o’clock
in the morning, and the men on the night shift were
taking their midnight spell off. Bunt was back
at his old occupation of miner, and I—the
one loafer of all that little world of workers—had
brought him a bottle of beer to go with the “chaw”;
for Bunt and I were ancient friends.
As we emerged from the cool, cave-like dampness of
the mine and ran out into the wonderful night air
of the Sierra foothills, warm, dry, redolent of witch-hazel,
the carboy began to cough, and, after we had climbed
out of the car and had sat down on the embankment to
eat and drink, Bunt observed:
“D’ye hear that bark? That kid’s
a one-lunger for fair. Which ain’t no salubrious
graft for him—this hiking cars about in
the bowels of the earth, Some day he’ll sure
up an’ quit. Ought to go down to Yuma a
spell.”
The engineer in the mill was starting the stamps.
They got under way with broken, hiccoughing dislocations,
bumping and stumbling like the hoofs of a group of
horses on the cattle-deck in a gale. Then they
jumped to a trot, then to a canter, and at last settled
down to the prolonged roaring gallop that reverberated
far off over the entire canon.
