for a little, after he had realized the fact that the water could mount no higher, saxe experienced such joy as must come to any normal person on escaping out of the peril of death. ultimately, however, the first emotion wore itself out by its own intensity, and he was left free to think coherently again. the result was disastrous. there leaped in his consciousness the hideous truth that death was not avoided, only postponed. this refuge on the heap of rocks offered safety from drowning, from being crushed by the waves against the walls. it gave no more. on this tiny island, the two were marooned, with naught to expect save a slow, a frightful death. they had been borne hither on the first in-rush of the waters, and only the height of the cavern had saved them at that time. now, there was no means by which they might make their way out from this prison. beyond the chamber in which they were, the passage that led to the outdoors first dipped sharply. for a great way it must[333] be filled with the flood. margaret west had spoken of another entrance somewhere, but she had told him nothing in detail. it was evident that this could not be in the chamber, or if there, it must be covered by the lake’s flow, incapable of affording egress. had it place near the roof, the light of it must have shown clearly against the stygian blackness. and there was no faintest gleam of light anywhere. saxe’s eyes roved in fierce longing, but nowhere was there aught except the total darkness. for once, the sage had reasoned ill. there had been grisly mockery in his cry that they were safe—in this place where there could be no safety. this was in truth the safety of the tomb—a narrow perch whereon to attend death, to wait, supine, impotent, for a laggard dissolution by starvation. and billy realized now the dread certainty of their plight; otherwise, he had not sat there in grim silence. surely, roy and david had the better part, since their engulfment had been swift. they were spared the lingering tortures of these survivors, destined to a few dreadful hours. then saxe remembered the miser’s gold, and the hate of it welled high in his heart. truly, there[334] had been a curse on it! and the wretched man thought of margaret most of all. but that which he thought of her should not be written. it was the supreme agony.
saxe had the courage of the strong man, but nature permits no man to lay down his life uselessly without revolt. neither saxe nor billy was a coward, yet each was craven there in that eyrie above the flood, which imprisoned them in eternal night. the crime of masters had brought wanton destruction upon them. there was no solace of justice in this doom. they were abandoned of hope. their hearts were sick within them.
billy walker spoke at last, and his voice was humbler than its wont, less sonorous, too. the first angry uproar of the waters was ended now, although they were rippling and swirling daintily still, as if in tender caresses of the rocks, which so recently they had smitten in fury. above the gentle noise of the eddies, the sage’s voice, mild as it was comparatively, sounded clearly. instantly, a cry came from the far side of the chamber.
“billy! billy! you’re alive!”
it was roy’s voice, and another voice broke[335] in on the words, shouting shrilly:
“billy! thank god!” it was david’s voice.
billy roared so joyously that all other tones were lost for a time, but, at last, roy and david caught saxe’s higher pitch, and they were glad anew. across the room, questions and answers were volleyed. it was made known that roy and david, at the first rush of the lake upon them, had held to the projections of the rock where they had just made fast the tackle, and had climbed higher until they were safe above the flood. now, they rested aloft on a tiny shelf of stone, only a little way beneath the roof, and they, even as saxe and billy, realized to the full the impossibility of escape from this sepulchre within the earth. and roy lamented in characteristic fashion, after saxe and billy had explained the cause of the lake’s in-flow, which had been a mystery to the other two.
“i’m sorry i couldn’t have had a chance at masters before he went.”
david’s voice, usually so kindly, was harsh as he spoke:
“the skunk got us, after all,” he mourned. he added, with frank ferocity: “damn him!”[336] he knew, as did the others, that such speech concerning the dead was unseemly. yet none rebuked him. for a moment, the warmth of wrath was comfort against the chill desolation of their case.
nevertheless, billy walker’s ruling passion was so strong that not even death might daunt it. the action of masters required some explanation, to make all clear before the less-orderly minds of his friends. so, after a period of reflection, he expounded his understanding of the engineer’s part in the final act of their drama. the volume of his voice was such that he did not need to go beyond his usual conversational thundering to be heard distinctly by those on the opposite side of the chamber.
“masters, naturally, didn’t mean to do this thing,” he declared. “he wasn’t the type to commit suicide. he kept track of us all the time. how he did it doesn’t matter especially. probably, he used another entrance to the cavern, which we don’t know. anyhow, he learned what it was we had found down this way. i guess he spied on us, and heard you, roy, and dave, working on the tackle, and took it for granted we were all here together.[337] he thought he could burrow through, and get at the gold himself while we were off after help. he meant to blow an opening just big enough to get through, i fancy. he failed to take into consideration the frailness of the roof that stood between the passage and the lake. he blew a hole in the bottom of the lake—and that was the beginning of our troubles, and the ending of his. he couldn’t find a refuge like ours in that other passage. exit masters—i regret our fate, but not his.” with this succinct statement, the sage relapsed into silence, which continued until roy relieved his overwrought feelings by a denunciation against fate.
“i’ve been on the edge of dying many a time,” he declared, bitterly; “but i was never up against this sort of thing before, and i’m free to say that i don’t like it. there’s some satisfaction in being done to death in a good fight, or in battling your best against any kind of odds. of course, a man doesn’t exactly want to die, any time. but what puts me in the dumps is this particular variety of dying that we’re up against here. we’ve got to sit roosting on a shelf in the dark, like a heathen[338] idol in a temple after it’s been buried in an earthquake—and we’ve just got to sit till we starve to death. i do hope i run across masters in the next world.”
“let us hope for your own sake that both you and dave do not have your wishes granted concerning masters in the next world,” billy exclaimed. the grim jest was not amusing in their situation. the three hearers shivered a little, and were silent.
afterward, the four gave themselves to serious meditation, as is fitting to men in the presence of death. on one occasion, billy, in answer to a question from david, discoursed freely on the reasonableness of belief in a future life, and pleaded in defense of such faith with a lucid sincerity and completeness that first surprised, then comforted his audience. each, after his own fashion, believed in the continuance of life through death; none the less, each was loath to put off the garment of mortality. billy walker would fain have remained on earth for a larger accumulation of its wisdom, with which, as it seemed to him, he had only just begun. saxe’s heart was near to breaking over the knowledge that he must go[339] from margaret into the unknown places, where she would not be. roy felt the like desolation because of may. david, since he had no particular thing to regret with superlative sadness, let his longing touch on many things, and grief was heavy upon him, because he must lose all—all!
a single incident afforded the unhappy men diversion from their plight. after some discussion, it was agreed that it would make the situation a trifle less dreary if the four of them were gathered in one place, instead of being divided by the width of the chamber. the shelf on which roy and david had ensconced themselves was not of a size sufficient to accommodate the other two. for that matter, its dimensions were unduly restricted even for those already there. on the other hand, the top of the heap of rocks up which saxe and billy had climbed afforded ample room for all, besides giving better opportunity for the securing of water to drink, since the massed stones were easy of ascent and descent. unfortunately, there was a difficulty in the way of consummating the assembly of the four in the one place, due to the fact that david could not[340] swim. it was arranged finally, however, that billy walker should swim across the chamber, being guided by the voices of roy and david, and that then he and roy should support the other across to the heap of stones, being guided in turn by the voice of saxe, who would remain behind for that purpose. at once, when this arrangement had been made, billy clambered down the rocks with many a sigh, until the water supported him. then, he swam easily to the point from which roy was calling. david let himself down into the water through the blackness without demur as his friends bade him, and very quickly he was carried across to the place indicated by the voice of saxe. a minute later, the four friends were reunited on their microscopic island, and the fact yielded them a pleasure melancholy and fleeting, yet a pleasure, an alleviation, where no alleviation had seemed possible.
even in this fatal plight, the sage preserved his serenity, and from time to time startled his companions by his utterances, thus breaking in by ever so little on the torment of their spirits. they had just finished drinking as best they might from cupped hands dipped into the[341] water at their feet, and david had spoken of being already hungry, when billy laughed in his usual noisy outburst.
“exactly!” he exclaimed. “always, when a man is confronted with absolute lack of provisions, he at once develops a ravenous appetite. he may have eaten five meals on the day of the wreck, and have gorged to repletion five minutes before the ship foundered. when he has become acquainted with the fact that he is adrift on the ocean in an open boat with only a few drops of water in the beaker, and ten wormy biscuits for six persons, he immediately begins to feel the gnawing pangs of ravenous hunger and deadly thirst. naturally it will be so with us. david has already spoken. for my part, i confess that i, too, hear the generalissimo of the belly clamoring for reinforcements, although i enjoyed a capital and capacious breakfast, and it’s not yet anywhere near the scheduled hour for luncheon on the earth above.”
at that, there came a chorus of protests from the others, who had listened patiently enough hitherto:
[342]“not time for luncheon!” roy exclaimed, indignantly. “man, you’re crazy.”
“it’s well along in the night,” saxe affirmed.
“or, maybe, toward the morning of next day.” david spoke with the emphasis of entire conviction. “we’ve been here close to twenty-four hours, already.”
“or even more,” roy added, defiantly.
billy walker chuckled—a great volume of sound, which sent multiplying echoes afar over the placid water that shut them off from life.
“the exercise of reason convinces me that all of you are quite wrong,” the sage remarked, very genially. “there are certain well-known facts that compel me to believe you are wrong in your estimate of the time already elapsed since your incarceration by the flood. you are, perhaps, aware that in situations such as ours, the human mind errs outrageously in its calculations of time. persons buried alive for a few hours invariably deem the time many days. one lives through great suffering; he believes that the time of his agony has been correspondingly great, though it may have been a matter of seconds, rather than of hours.[343] this involuntary exaggeration seems a universal rule. we can’t reasonably believe that we are constituted differently from other men. with the judgment clarified by reason, based on knowledge of allied facts, i am compelled to believe—in direct contradiction to my own feelings, as well as yours—that the time elapsed since the lake broke in on us hasn’t been more than—” billy paused to reflect, running over the sequence of events, as the basis of computation.
“well, how long is it—measured by logic, and not by emotion?” saxe demanded, somewhat sulkily.
“and, after all,” billy remarked musingly, “time is only one of the categories of human thought, as kant pointed out. to me, it seems eons since i was in the great out-of-doors—free, free to live. i judge by reasoning that we have been shut up here for nearly an hour—not quite.”
before roy could voice the protest on his lips, a cry came from saxe:
“hark! hark!”
the others held silent, marveling what this might mean. to their ears came the gentle[344] lapping of the waves against the walls of the prison-house, the faint sighs of their own breathing—nothing else. after a long time, saxe spoke again; and his voice was lifeless, where before it had been vibrant with feeling.
“i must be going mad,” he said, simply. “i thought that i heard—someone—calling my name.”
