down the drive.
When Big King came up out of the gloom, Rod indicated the dangling cable.
'There!' he gasped, and Big King narrowed his eyes in acknowledgement; he was unable to speak.
It was five minutes before they could commence the excruciating business of hauling the dinghy up and securing it to the door frame.
Again they rested. Their movements were slowing up drastically.
Neither of them had much strength left to draw upon.
'Get hold of the end of the cable.' Rod instructed Big King, and he dragged himself over the side of the dinghy and lay sprawled full-length on the floor boards.
His weight forced the dinghy deeper, increasing its resistance to the racing water, and the rope strained against the wooden frame. Rod began clumsily to unpack the battery blaster. Big King stood waist-deep clinging with one arm to the wooden frame, reaching forward with the other towards the end of the green-coated cable. It danced just beyond his fingertips, and he edged forward against the current, steadying himself against the timber frame, placing a greater strain on the retainin bolts.
His fingers closed on the cable and with a grunt of satisfaction he passed it back to Rod.
Working with painstaking deliberation, Rod connected the crocodile clips from the reel of wire to the loose end of the green cable. Rod's plan was for both he and Big King to climb aboard the dinghy, and, paying out the nylon rope, let themselves be carried back down the drive. At the same time they would be letting the wire run from its reel. At a safe distance they would fire the drop-blast matt.
Rod's fingers were swollen and numbed. The minutes passed as he completed his preparations and all that while the strain on the wooden frame was heavy and constant.
Rod looked up from his task, and crawled to his knees.
'All right, Big King,' he wheezed as he knelt in the bows of the dinghy and gripped the wooden frame to steady the dinghy. 'Come aboard. We are ready.' Big King waded forward and at that instant the retaining bolts on one side of the heavy timber frame gave way. With a rending, tearing sound the frame slewed across the tunnel.
The beams of timber crossed each other like the blades of a pair of gigantic scissors. Both Rod's arms were between the beams. The bones in his forearms snapped with the loud crackle of breaking sticks.
With a scream of pain Rod collapsed onto the floorboards of the dinghy, his arms useless, sticking out at absurd angles from their shattered bones. Three feet away Big King was still in the water. His mouth was wide open, but no sound issued from his throat. He stood still as a black statue and his eyes bulged from their sockets. Even through his own suffering Rod was horrified by the expression on Big King's contorted features.
Below the surface of the water the bottom timber beams had performed the same scissor movement, but this time they had caught Big King's lower body between them. They had closed across his pelvis and crushed it. Now they held him in a vice like grip from which it was not possible to shake them.
The white face and the black face were but a few feet apart. The two stricken companions in disaster looked into each other's eyes and knew that there was no escape. They were doomed.
'My arms,' whispered Rod huskily. 'I cannot use them.' Big King's bulging eyes held Rod's gaze.
'Can you reach the blaster?' Rod whispered urgently.
'Take it and turn the handle. Burn it, Big King, burn it! Slow comprehension showed in Big King's pain-glazed eyes.
'We are finished, Big King. Let us go like men. Burn it, bring down the rock!' Above them the rock was sown with explosive. The blaster was connected. In his agitation Rod tried to reach out for the blaster. His forearm swung loosely, the fingers hanging open like the petals of a dead flower, and the pain checked him.
'Get it, Big King,' Rod urged him, and Big King picked up the blaster and held it against his chest with one arm.
'The handle!' Rod encouraged him. 'Turn the handle!' But instead Big King reached into the dinghy once more and drew the machete from its sheath. 'What are you doing?' Rod demanded, and in reply Big King swung the blade back over his shoulder and then brought it forward in a gleaming arc aimed at the nylon rope that held the dinghy anchored to the wooden frame.
Clunk! The blade bit into the wood, severing the rope that was bound around it.
Freed by the stroke of the machete, the dinghy was whisked away by the current. Lying in the dancing rubber dinghy, Rod heard a bull voice bellow above the rush of the water.
'Go in peace, my friend.' Then Rod was careening back along the drive, a hell ride during which the dinghy spun like a top and in the beam of his lamp the roof and walls melted into a dark racing blur as Rod lay maimed on the floor of the dinghy.
Then suddenly the air jarred against his ear drums, a long rolling concussion in the confines of the drive and he knew that Big King had fired the drop-blast matt. Rodney Ironsides slipped over the edge of consciousness into a soft warm dark place from which he hoped never to return.
Dimitri squatted on his haunches above the shaft at 65 level. He was smoking his tenth cigarette. The rest of the men waited as impatiently as he did; every few minutes Dimitri would cross to the shaft and flash his lamp down the hundred-foot hole to 66 level.
'How long have they been gone?' he asked, and they all glanced at their watches.
'An hour and ten minutes.'
'No, an hour and fourteen minutes.' 'Christ, call me a liar for four minutes!' and they lapsed into silence once more. Suddenly the station telephone shrilled, and Dimitri jumped up and ran to it.
'No, Mr. Hirschfeld, nothing yet!' He listened a moment.
'All right, send him down then.' He hung up the telephone, and his men looked at him enquiringly.
'They are sending down a policeman,' he explained.
'What the hell for?'
'They want Big King.'
'Why?'
'Warrant of arrest for murder.'
'Murder?'
'Ja, they reckon he murdered the Portuguese storekeeper.'
'Jeer!'
'Big King, is that so!' Delighted to have found something to pass the time, they fell into an animated debate.
The police inspector arrived in the cage at 65 level, but he was disappointing. He looked like a down-at-heel undertaker, and he replied to their eager questions with a sorrowful stare that left them stuttering.
For the fifteenth time Dimitri went to the shaft and peered down into it. The blast shook the earth around them, a long rumbling that persisted for many seconds.
'They've done it! yelled Dimitri, and began to caper wildly. His men leapt to their feet and began beating each other on the back, shouting and laughing. The police inspector alone took no part in the celebrations.
'Wait,' yelled Dimitri at last. 'Shut up all of you! Shut up! Damn it! Listen!' They fell silent.
'What is it?' someone asked. 'I can't hear anything.'
'That's just id' exulted Dimitri. 'The water! It has stopped Only then did they become aware that the dull roar of water to which their ears had become resigned was now ended. It was quiet; a cathedral hush lay upon the workings.
They began to cheer, their voices thin in the silence, and Dimitri ran to the steel ladder and swarmed down it like a monkey.
From thirty feet up Dimitri saw the dinghy marooned amongst the filth and debris around the shaft. He recognized the crumpled figure lying in the bottom of it.
'Rod!' he was shouting before he reached the station at 66 level.
'Rod, are you all right?' The floor of the haulage was wet, and here and there a trickle of water still snaked towards the shaft. Dimitri ran to the stranded dinghy and started to turn Rod onto his back. Then he saw his arms.
'Oh, Christ!' he gasped in horror, then he was yelling up the ladder.
'Get a stretcher down here.' Rod regained consciousness to find himself covered with blankets and strapped securely into a mine stretcher. His arms were sprinted and bandaged, and from the familiar rattle and rush of air he knew he was in the cage on the way to the surface.
He recognized Dimitri's voice raised argumentatively.
'Damn it! The man is unconscious and badly injured, can't you leave him alone?'
'I have my duty to perform,' a strange voice answered.
'What's he want, Dimitri?'Rod croaked.
'Rod, how are you?' At the sound of his voice Dimitri was kneeling beside the stretcher anxiously.
'Bloody awful,' Rod whispered. 'What does this joker want?'
'He's a police officer. He wants to arrest Big King for murder,' Dimitri explained.
'Well, he's a bit bloody late,' whispered Rod, and even through his pain this seemed to Rod to be terribly funny.
He began to laugh. He sobbed with laughter, each convulsion sending
