He pried away a huge boulder at the top of the heap and stood to one side as he exerted all the leverage of the iron bar. The great rock wavered, then rolled down the side of the heap into the open tunnel. Joe waited anxiously.
To his relief there was no crash of rock from the top of the tunnel. The removal of the boulder had left a small opening.
He shouted again:
“Frank! can you hear me?”
A surge of gladness passed over him when he heard his brother’s voice in reply:
“I hear you. What’s happened?”
“The shaft caved in.”
“The main shaft?”
“Yes.”
“I heard the crash. I shouted to you but I didn’t hear any answer. Are you hurt?”
“No. I’m all right. I jumped back just in time.”
“Where are you now? Can’t you reach me?”
“The tunnel caved in, too. I’m trying to dig my way through to you.”
There was a moment of silence. Clearly, the news came as a surprise to Frank.
“That’s bad,” he said, at last. “Do you think you can get through?”
“I think so. I have the crowbar with me.” Joe attacked another rock on the heap, edging the end of the crowbar into a crevice.
“How bad is the cave-in?”
“Very bad. The whole shaft went.”
“That means we’ll not be able to get out of here.”
“We may find a way.”
“Well, try to get through to me first. Then we’ll see what we’re to do.”
Joe continued his labors at the rock pile. One by one he managed to dislodge heavy rocks and boulders until at last he had cleared away an aperture of sufficient extent to admit the passage of his body. He shoved the crowbar ahead of him and crawled over the remaining rocks.
Within a few minutes he had reached his brother, who was lying in the same position in which Joe had last seen him.
“How’s the foot?”
“All right,” Frank answered. “It isn’t hurting any. See what you can do with that crowbar.”
Joe inserted the end of the crowbar beneath the boulder, resting the middle of the bar on the boulder beneath. Then, exerting all his strength, he weighed down on the bar.
Slowly, gradually, the great rock began to move.
“It’s giving way!” cried Frank. “Just a little more—a little more!”
By means of the bar and the principles of leverage Joe was able to apply much more strength to the removal of the boulder than if he had tried to move it with his bare hands. He shifted his grasp, bore down on the bar again, and the great boulder rose higher.
“Good,” declared Frank, dragging himself forward. “I’m free.”
He extricated his foot from the crevice and Joe lessened his weight on the bar. The boulder fell back into place again. But Frank was no longer a prisoner.
“That’s that!” Frank ejaculated, scrambling to a sitting position and beginning to rub his ankle to restore circulation. “I’m out of that little jam, anyway, thanks to you and that crowbar.”
Joe sat down on a nearby rock.
“We’re up against a worse dilemma now,” he said.
Frank looked grave.
“I know it. Still, there may be a way out. You say there’s no use trying to get back up the shaft?”
“None at all. The whole place caved in with a crash.”
“What caused it?”
“That crowbar had evidently been left there to prop up a weak place in the side of the shaft, and when I moved it, the whole thing gave way. Some of the rocks came tumbling out, and then the side of the shaft caved in. If I hadn’t jumped back in the nick of time my goose would have been cooked. There must be a couple of tons of rock in the shaft now.”
“We couldn’t dig our way through?”
Joe shook his head. “We’d be wasting time trying. I guess the only thing we can hope for is that somebody heard the crash and comes to see what happened.”
“But they don’t know we’re down here.”
“That’s true, too. And they won’t be very likely to start clearing away the shaft unless they know we’re here. This mine was abandoned a long time ago, by the looks of things.”
“They might see our footprints up to the side of the shaft.”
“It was snowing when we came here. They may be covered over by now.”
The boys were silent. They realized that their plight was almost hopeless. In the cold, dark depths of the earth, with their air supply cut off, they were facing suffocation, exposure and starvation, and there seemed not the slightest possibility of escape.
“The only thing to do,” said Frank, at last, “is to keep on following this tunnel. There’s no use going back into the mine itself.”
“No, there’s no use going back. But to my mind I don’t think there’s any use going ahead, either. This tunnel probably ends in a blank wall.”
“We might as well find out. We won’t do ourselves any good by just sitting here and waiting to die.” Frank got to his feet and picked up his flashlight. “Better turn out your light,” he advised. “We need only one light at a time and we might as well be saving the batteries.”
Joe got up and did as his brother had suggested.
Frank went on down the passage, followed by Joe. The boys felt in their hearts that there was very little hope that the passage would lead anywhere, but it seemed to be the only possible avenue of escape. They recognized that it was only a “drift” that the miners had dug and blasted away from the main workings in an effort to discover a vein of gold, and the fact that it had not been further developed seemed to indicate that the search had been unsuccessful and that the drift had been abandoned.
“I wish we had told dad exactly where we were going to go today,” said Frank as they went slowly on down the tunnel.
“So do I. There’d be a chance for us then. They’d send someone out to look for us, and then they could start to work clearing away that shaft.”
“Well,
