LXIII
She could see no daylight, and thought that night must have fallen, until a patch of golden red appeared high above her.
“Is Harry with you?”
“Yes,” she replied. “One moment.”
She went back to find him cowering against the wall, and gripped him by the shoulders.
“Harry,” she said pleadingly, “they have found us!”
He scowled up at her.
“Who have found us?”
“Dick—everybody. We sha’n’t have long to wait now.”
He licked his lips.
“Dick and everybody,” he said dully. “That is strange… found us!”
She flew back to the little shaft.
“Are you hungry?” boomed the voice.
“Very,” she answered. “But that doesn’t matter—I can live without food for another twelve hours. We’re in a sort of underground room. The roof of the passage has fallen in.”
“How long is the passage?” asked Dick quickly.
She thought a moment.
“About forty yards, I think. It cannot be much less.”
“How far from your end is it blocked?” and when she told him, she heard him groan.
“Leslie.”
“Yes?”
“I’m sending something down to you at the end of a string. It is a pocket compass. Will you tell me exactly the bearings?”
It reached her at last, battered, its glass broken. She put the little instrument on the floor.
“Put it where I can see it,” he said. “Have you a light?”
She flashed the lamp upon it.
“Where is the north? Just touch the place with your finger. Wait, I will send for field glasses.”
Ten minutes passed, and then he said again:
“Now show me.” And when she had indicated the north, he asked her where the cavern was.
“Exactly west,” she said with tremulous triumph. “Will it be a long time before you reach us?”
He made no answer to this.
“Tell me how many paces you are from the compass,” and when she had paced it off and had told him, he groaned.
By this time the consulting engineer to whom he had telephoned in the afternoon was on the spot.
“The cavern is exactly under the bed of the river,” said that official.
“Could we enlarge this hole?” asked Dick.
The surveyor shook his head.
“Impossible. It would take you the best part of a month to blast a way down. There’s a long fault in the rock here which accounts for the river’s course,” he added. “Both banks are solid; I can assure you on that point, because my predecessor bored for water for your respected father.”
Dick groaned. He could keep the girl alive for a month, but the strain of it would kill her. Then there flashed simultaneously to two minds a solution.
“Why not break the dam of the Ravensrill?” he said, and Puttler, who had the words on his lips, nodded.
“That’s the idea,” he said. “Undo the work of your ancestor! Turn the course of the river to the Long Meadow—there’s a natural bed for it!”
Ten minutes later the telephone at Fossaway Manor was busy, and here Mary Wenner was a heaven-sent helper. Every great contractor within twenty miles had his instructions, and within an hour charabancs, motor-cars, omnibuses, crowded with horny-handed workmen, were lumbering up the drive. Car succeeded car, and disgorged the fustian-clad navvies. They had been taken from alehouses, from their homes, from workmen’s clubs, drawn even from the cinemas of distant Brighton, and every hour the number swelled, until there were a thousand men working by the light of naphtha flames on the great dump behind Fossaway Manor.
At ten o’clock the omnibuses and lorries were still rolling up the drive; trolleys laden with wheelbarrows and tools were being rapidly unloaded at the side of the dump. All southern Sussex worked to cut the dam of the Ravensrill, and the big dump grew smaller and smaller. Presently, as the water rose, it spilled into the bed that it had left for hundreds of years and flowed its irregular course, sweeping aside barns that had been hastily evacuated, lapping the walls of one cottage, the inhabitants of which had been removed in time. Little by little the water in the old bed sank and sank until it was a dark mass of weeds and silvery shapes that leapt up and down in extremis. Water voles, trout, pike were shovelled to the bank, and the bed of the river attacked by men who worked at fever pace, being relieved every half hour.
“If there is rock there,” said the surveyor, “we are dished. My own belief is that there’s nothing but sand.”
“And shingle?” suggested Puttler.
“No, sir, there’s no shingle. It is a curious fact that we’ve never found shingle in the Ravensrill. They’ve struck the sand now,” he said, looking down into the hole, which the men were shoring with logs of timber. “And I’m glad there is no shingle—sand is much easier to work.”
He had hardly spoken the words before the foreman shouted:
“We’ve struck shingle here, governor!”
“Shingle?” The surveyor went down the ladder into the hole.
“It is only a layer,” he said when he came back, “but even that is rather surprising. It opens up all sorts of possibilities.”
Dick did not listen. The value of shingle to a county surveyor was of no more interest to him than the value of sand to a grocer.
The work was now heavier. A derrick and windlass had to be rigged to move the heavy loads from the cutting, and that took a considerable time, during which he paid frequent visits to the “wishing well.”
It was after the shingle had been discovered that Harry’s voice answered him.
“Is that you, Dick? What are you fellows doing up there?”
The voice held all the old irritation and fretfulness. Briefly Dick described what was happening.
“Couldn’t you send me something down so that I could work below?” asked Harry. “I’m perfectly sure I could make it much easier for you.”
To humour him, Dick Alford found a light crowbar and with great difficulty lowered it. Because of its shape and size, the operation was a painfully slow one, and Harry fretted and fumed below.
“Hurry, for heaven’s sake!” he shouted. “You don’t suppose I want to stay down here, do you? I’ve a tremendous lot of work to do—you know that, Dick, very well.”
Dick did not answer, but his anxiety increased. He knew Harry and his symptoms all too well to be under any illusion as to what would follow if his irritation grew beyond the power of restraint, and it was with a sigh of thankfulness that he felt the crowbar caught in the eager hands of his brother.
“Be very careful how you use this,” he called. “The men are working from above and you may have a fall unless you take the greatest care.”
But he was talking to the air. Harry had gone and it was Leslie who answered him.
“How long will you be, Dick?” she asked.
“I don’t know, my dear. A few hours, not longer. Are you all right?”
A little hesitation.
“Yes, I’m all right.”
“Is Harry?”
A longer pause.
“I think so. Is it possible to send something down that he could take?”
Earlier in the evening Dick had tried to pass the end of a thin rubber tube to the imprisoned pair, but the attempt had been futile.
“I’ll try,” he said, and went in search of one of the two doctors who had been summoned.
From him he obtained two small brown pellets, and these, wrapped in paper and weighted, were dropped into the wishing well.
“Thank you,” said her low voice. “I don’t know how I can use them, and for the moment he is very busy.”