“Dig, men! Dig for your lives!” Mr. Briggs, his face pale with anxiety, stood over half a dozen men who were making the coal fly as they dug into it in search of what they dreaded to find. Ned, in a state of semi-collapse, stood by the engineer.
“Now, bear up, Strong,” said that officer, “there’s a chance that he may be all right. Don’t give way.”
But, although the chief engineer spoke hopefully, he did not entertain a doubt that Herc must have been crushed into annihilation beneath the subsided mass of coal. There was just one chance, though, and it was that which incited the engineer to urge the men engaged in the work of rescue to work as they had never worked before.
[150]
But they needed no urging. Herc was a general favorite on board, and the thought that he was in there under that mass of coal gave each man twice the strength that he normally possessed. They dug on, careless of fatigue under the stimulus of the work in hand. Suddenly one of them stopped.
“Did you hear something, mates?” he cried excitedly.
“No, what was it?”
“I thought I heard a kind of a tapping sound,” rejoined the man who had first spoken.
“It’ll be the spirit of the poor lad,” remarked an old sailor who was one of the diggers.
“Nonsense,” spoke Mr. Briggs sharply, stepping forward. “What did you say you heard, Adams?”
“I thought I heard a tapping sound, sir; but I couldn’t be sure. Yes; there it is again! Hark!”
They listened with strained ears. If there was really tapping going on within the bunker it could[151] only mean one thing, and that was that Herc was alive!
The next instant they thrilled with excitement. Slowly and not very loudly amid the manifold noises all about, there came the distinct sound of a regular tap-tap—tap-tap-tap!
Mr. Briggs, ordinarily self-contained and reserved, gave a jubilant shout.
“It is the one hope that I held on to in the face of everything!” he cried. “The boy is alive.”
“But how—how could he have avoided being crushed to death when the coal fell in?” demanded Ned.
“When that coal was loaded, as is customary, certain board partitions were put in at intervals to keep it from shifting. When I heard that the coal had caved in on you, I made up my mind at once that it was one of these partitions that had been undermined and had given way. My faint hope that by a miracle Taylor might have been saved, was based on a desperate belief that[152] by some marvelous chance the boards might have fallen in such a way as to keep the coal above them from crushing Taylor’s body.”
As may be imagined, while Mr. Briggs was giving this explanation, the digging had been resumed with even more frenzied haste than before.
“Stick to it, boy! We’re coming!” shouted the diggers, and each time they uttered these and other encouraging shouts the tapping came back in reply.
Ned, half frantic with excitement, had seized upon a shovel and was digging with might and main. At last their shovels broke through the coal and penetrated into a hollow space beyond. The beams falling from above where the bunkers widened out had become wedged in the narrower part of the bunkers below. In this way a shield had p............