mine, they were not prepared for the bright light of three hundred or more glow-canaries. The cages hung from the cavernous ceiling far above them and the light illuminated one of the largest rooms Lex had ever seen in his life. It was massive? and it was only because there were so very many glow-canaries that they were up to the task of illuminating it at all.
The room contained a railway track. Or, at least, the hub of one. The track ran out of the room in several different directions. Presumably, the little carriages had been intended to transport equipment in and gold out. But they had never got very far with the actual mining and Lex assumed that the railway, too, was unfinished.
He and Jesse moved cautiously into the cavern. They walked past laid and unlaid track, and a couple of steam trains with names like I. M. Daring. A multitude of rusty tools lay around on the gravelly floor, too. There was something a little sad about the abandoned scene? with all that stuff just left down there to rot. When the great gold rush had started, bright-eyed, hopeful people had flocked to Dry Gulch thinking that they were going to make a fortune when, in actual fact, they had met only with disaster, death and destruction before they were finally forced to close up the mine, cut their losses and flee.
Jesse and Lex passed through the cavern at a brisk walk. The canaries had started to talk to each other and that worried Lex. Whilst they may have only been chirping softly, the fact was that there was at least one fire-bunny down here and, possibly, a dragon as well that might be alerted to their presence by the noise.
‘Damned birds,’ Lex muttered under his breath.
At least the fact that the mine was unfinished meant that it shouldn’t take too many hours to explore it. If they covered every scrap of ground and failed to find a dragon then they would know that it was useless.
They were about halfway across the cavern when there was a dull rumbling. They could feel it as well as hear it. The very walls and floor seemed to tremble and bits of rubble fell from the ceiling. Now that sounded more like a dragon and this cavern would certainly be big enough for one. From the sounds of it, the thing was gigantic and, suddenly, the thought of attempting to kill it seemed… well… completely and utterly absurd. Lex was a clever thief, not a warrior. How the heck was he supposed to manage it?
But then the rabbits came. They poured out of the tunnel from which Lex and Jesse had entered, as well as the other three tunnels alongside that one. Perhaps, back in the days that the mine was being built, there had just been a small pack of fire-bunnies. Now there were hundreds. And hundreds. And hundreds of them. And they were all swarming directly towards Jesse and Lex, some of them even shooting little plumes of fire from their mouths in their excitement.
‘Oh my Gods,’ Lex whispered.
He and Jesse spun on the spot and ran along a line of track towards one of the exits, out of the cavern. A single cart was perched in the dark arch, poised to run along the track sloping downwards into the next room.
‘Get in the wagon!’ Lex shouted, leaping in.
‘Get in?’ Jesse gasped, aghast. ‘Have you gone barmy? We don’t know where that track goes! It ain’t safe! It might not even hold our weight-’
‘Get in here right this second or I’m leaving without you!’ Lex snapped. ‘I don’t care where it goes! We can’t escape those things on foot and they’ll be on us any moment now!’
Jesse glanced over his shoulder. And Lex took the opportunity to grab his arm and drag him bodily into the cart. The cowboy lost his balance and flipped into it head first. There was barely room for the two of them and the force of Jesse’s bulk landing inside was all that was needed to push the cart forwards on to the track.
As it turned out, the next room wasn’t a room so much as another huge cavern, even bigger than the first one. As before, the caged glow-canary? still clutched in Lex’s arms? set off all the rest. There were hundreds of them hanging from the ceiling again. No doubt they had been brought in to illuminate the area so that the workmen could see the monstrosity they were building. It looked like some sort of wooden roller coaster. Tracks on stilts weaved everywhere within the great space, from all directions, branching off this way and that to other parts of the mine.
Unfortunately, so much track meant that certain routes had to bend and dip rather horribly in order to fit in with the rest of it, and the track Lex and Jesse were on went, almost instantly, into a two-hundred-foot drop. Jesse barely had time to right himself in the cart behind Lex before it was plummeting downwards.
The two of them screamed their heads off. The rickety little wheels of the cart blazed along, leaving a trail of sparks and making a horrible, tearing, rusty, screeching sound, as if they were about to come right off the track altogether.
But then, suddenly, it levelled out. Despite the initial drop, they were still astonishingly high. Then they found themselves shooting upwards, carried along by the force of their own momentum. They came to a brief slow at the top of the curve? just long enough for Lex to glance back and see that the rabbits had reached the entrance and, unable to stop themselves, a whole load of them were toppling through the arch like lemmings, freefalling the two- hundred-foot drop to the tracks below. That seemed to kill them, which was reassuring. Finally, they managed to stop themselves and, instead, piled up in the archway, blowing fire out into the cavern. They were far too far away to be able to reach Lex and Jesse, for that brief, frenetic wagon ride had carried them right out to the middle of the cavern.
‘Perhaps we oughta try and get out-’ Jesse began, but it was already too late.
The cart tipped over the top of the curve and then they were speeding off again. This time the drop was not so steep, but the track was long and straight instead, heading directly towards a tunnel on the opposite side of the cavern. Jesse was relieved at first, for this would surely get them off this helter-skelter of death. But then Lex said, ‘Uh oh.’
When you’re speeding along on an ancient, unfinished mining track, the very last thing you want to hear coming out of anyone’s mouth is, Uh oh.
‘What?’ Jesse asked.
‘The track runs out up ahead.’
Jesse looked over Lex’s shoulder and saw that he was right. The track ran out abruptly. Where it should have continued, there was just empty space stretching out ahead? and they were speeding right towards it. Perhaps it had collapsed due to age and damp, or perhaps that part of the track had never been built to begin with. However it had happened, the track disappeared out from under the cart a bare second later and Lex and Jesse found themselves hurtling through the air with a great cavernous drop stretching out beneath them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
‘Jump!’ Lex shouted.
But jumping from a falling cart is actually harder than you might think. They therefore didn’t so much jump, as throw themselves over the edge towards a stretch of nearby track about ten feet below them. They smashed into it, causing it to move beneath their weight in a worrying sort of way, before it, thankfully, steadied. The cart, meanwhile, fell three hundred feet before it hit another piece of track and was smashed to bits.
Jesse, who was clinging to the track beside Lex, reached over and smacked the back of the thief’s head.
‘Ouch! What was that for?’ Lex demanded.
‘Dragging me into that cart!’ Jesse growled.
‘Oh, shut up. If I hadn’t, you’d have been eaten by the bunnies by now.’
‘Yeah, ’cos my position is so much better now, ain’t it?’
‘Well, I won’t save you again if you’re going to be that ungrateful,’ Lex replied. ‘Stop whining; it’s not that bad.’
He slowly got to his feet. His glow-canary had fallen a little further along the track, so he crept forwards and picked it up. The bird appeared to be unharmed and was still shining brightly, as were the other ones hanging from the ceiling.
‘Come on,’ Lex said. ‘We can walk to the other side.’
This was easier said than done, for they were at an incredible height and the track was narrow and had a tendency to shift beneath them. Lex forced himself to keep his eyes on the archway ahead and not to look down.
