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Blind Brother (Version 2 Dramatic Reading)

<h2>CHAPTER VI. THE FALL.</h2> It was true. Carolan’s quick eye had noticed the opportunity for Rennie to escape, and his fertile brain had been swift in planning an immediate rescue. The few members of his order that he could find on the instant were gathered together; there was a sudden onslaught at a dark corner of the Court-House Square; the sheriff and his deputy lay prone upon the ground, and their prisoner was slipping away through the dark, foggy streets, with a policeman’s bullet whizzing past his ears, and his band of rescuers struggling with the amazed officers. But the sheriff of Luzerne County never saw Jack Rennie again, nor was the hand of the law ever again laid upon him, in arrest or punishment. [110] As Tom walked home from the railroad station that night through the drizzling rain, his heart was lighter than it had been for many a day. True, he was nervous and worn with excitement and fatigue, but there was with him a sense of duty done, even though tardily, which brought peace into his mind and lightness to his footsteps. After the first greetings were had, and the little home group of three was seated together by the fire to question and to talk, Tom opened his whole heart. While his mother and Bennie listened silently, often with tears, he told the story of his adventure at the breaker on the night of the fire, of his temptation and fall at Wilkesbarre, of his mental perplexity and acute suffering, of the dramatic incidents of the trial, and of his own release from the bondage of bribery. When his tale was done, the poor blind brother, for whose sake he had stepped into the shadow of sin, and paid the penalty, declared, with laughter and with tears, that he had never before been so proud of Tom[111] and so fond of him as he was at that moment; and the dear, good mother took the big fellow on her lap, as she used to do when he was a little child, and held him up close to her heart, and rocked him till he fell asleep, and into his curly hair dropped now and then a tear, that was not the outcome of sorrow, but of deep maternal joy. It was well along in December before the strike came to an end. There had been rumors for a week of an approaching compromise between the miners and the operators, but one day there came word that all hands were to be at the mines, ready for work, the following morning. It was glad news for many a poor family, who saw the holidays approaching in company with bitter want; and it brought especial rejoicing to the little household dependent so largely on the labor of Tom and Bennie for subsistence. The boys were at the entrance to the mine the next morning before the stars began to pale in the east. They climbed into a car of the first trip, and rode down the slope to the music of echoes roaring[112] through galleries that had long been silent. The mules had been brought in the day before, and Tom ran whistling to the mine stables to untie his favorite Billy, and set him to his accustomed task. There came soon a half-dozen or more of driver-boys, and such a shouting and laughing and chattering ensued as made the beasts prick up their long ears in amazement. “All aboard!” shouted Tom, as he fastened his trace-hook to the first trip of cars. “Through train to the West! No stops this side o’ Chicorgo!” “’Commodation ahead! Parly cars on the nex’ train, an’ no porters ’lowed!” squeaked out a little fellow, backing his mule up to the second trip. “I’ll poke the fire a bit an’ git the steam up fur yez,” said Patsy Donnelly, the most mischievous lad of them all. Whereupon he prodded Tom’s mule viciously in the ribs, and that beast began playing such a tattoo with his heels against the front of the car as drowned all other noises in its clatter. [113] “Whoa, Billy!” shouted Tom, helping Bennie into the rear car of the trip. “Whoa, now! Stiddy—there, git-tup!” cracking his long leather whip-lash over Billy’s ears as he spoke, and climbing into the front car. “Git-tup! Go it! Whoop!” Away went Tom and Bennie, rattling up the long heading, imitating alternately the noise of the bell, the whistle, and the labored puffing of a locomotive engine; while the sound-waves, unable to escape from the narrow passage which confined them, rolled back into their ears in volumes of resounding echoes. Ah, they were happy boys that morning! happy even though one was smitten with the desolation of blindness, and both were compelled to labor, from daylight to dark, in the grimy recesses of the mine, for the pittance that brought their daily bread; happy, because they were young and free-hearted and innocent, and contented with their lot. And Tom was thrice happy, in that he had rolled away the burden of an accusing conscience, and felt the high pleasure that[114] nothing else on earth can so fully bring as the sense of duty done, against the frowning face and in the threatening teeth of danger. Sometimes, indeed, there came upon him a sudden fear of the vengeance he might meet at Rennie’s hands; but as the days passed by this fear disturbed him less and less, and the buoyancy of youth preserved him from depressing thoughts of danger. Billy, too, was in good spirits that morning, and drew the cars rapidly along the heading, swinging around the sharp curves so swiftly that the yellow flame from the little tin lamp was blown down to the merest spark of blue; and stopping at last by the door in the entrance, where Bennie was to dismount and sit all day at his lonely task. Three times Tom went down to the slope that morning, through Bennie’s door, with his trip of loads, and three times he came back, with his trip of lights; and the third time he stopped to sit with his brother on the bench and to eat, from the one pail[115] which served them both, the plain but satisfying dinner which Mommie had prepared for them. Tom was still light-hearted and jovial, but upon Bennie there seemed to have fallen since morning a shadow of soberness. To sit for hours with only one’s thoughts for company, and with the oppressive silence broken only at long intervals by the passing trips, this alone is enough to cast gloom upon the spirits of the most cheerful. But something more than this was weighing upon Bennie’s mind, for he told Tom, when they had done eating, that every time it grew still around him, and there were no cars in the heading or airway, and no noises to break the silence, he could hear, somewhere down below him, the “working” of the mine. He had heard it all the morning he said, when every thing was quiet, and, being alone so, it made him nervous and afraid. “I could stan’ most any thing,” he said, “but to get caught in a ‘fall.’” “Le’s listen an’ see if we can hear it now,” said Tom. [116] Then both boys kept very quiet for a little while, and sure enough, over in the darkness, they heard an occasional snapping, like the breaking of dry twigs beneath the feet. The process which the miners call “working” was going on. The pressure of the overlying mass of rock upon the pillars of coal left to support it was becoming so great that it could not be sustained, and the gradual yielding of the pillars to this enormous weight was being manifested by the crackling noises that proceeded from them, and the crumbling of tiny bits of coal from their bulging surfaces. The sound of working pillars is familiar to frequenters of the mines, and is the well-known warning which precedes a fall. The remedy is to place wooden props beneath the roof for additional support, and, if this is not done, there comes a time, sooner or later, when the strained pillars suddenly give way, and the whole mass comes crashing down, to fill the gangways and chambers over an area as great as that through which the working extended,[117] and to block the progress of mining for an indefinite time. Tom had been too long about the mines to be ignorant of all this, and so had Bennie; but they knew, too, that the working often continued weeks, and sometimes months, before the fall would take place, though it might, indeed, come at any moment. That afternoon Tom told the slope boss about the working, and he came and made an examination, and said he thought there was no immediate danger, but that he would give orders to have the extra propping of the place begun on the following day. “Jimmie Travis said he seen rats goin’ out o’ the slope, though, when he come in,” said Tom, after relating to Bennie the opinion of the mine boss. “Then ’twon’t be long,” replied Bennie, “’fore the fall comes.” He was simply echoing the belief of all miners, that rats will leave a mine in which a fall is about to take place. Sailors have the same belief concerning a ship about to sink. [118] “An’ when the rats begin to go out,” added Bennie, “it’s time for men an’ boys to think about goin’ out too.” Somehow, the child seemed to have a premonition of disaster. The afternoon wore on very slowly, and Bennie gave a long sigh of relief when he heard Tom’s last trip come rumbling down the airway. “Give me the dinner-pail, Bennie!” shouted Tom, as the door closed behind the last car, “an’ you catch on behind—Whoa, Billy!” as the mule trotted on around the corner into the heading. “Come, Bennie, quick! Give me your hand; we’ll have to run to catch him now.” But even as the last word trembled on the boy’s lips, there came a blast of air, like a mighty wind, and in the next instant a noise as of bursting thunder, and a crash that shook the foundations of the mines, and the two boys were hurled helplessly against Bennie’s closed door behind them. The fall had come. The terrible roar died away in a series[119] of rumbling echoes, and, at last, stillness reigned. “Bennie!” It was Tom who spoke. “Bennie!” He called the name somewhat feebly. “Bennie!” It was a shout at last, and there was terror in his voice. He raised himself to his feet, and stood leaning against the shattered frame-work of the door. He felt weak and dizzy. He was bruised and bleeding, too, but he did not know it; he was not thinking of himself, but of Bennie, who had not answered to his call, and who might be dead. He was in total darkness, but he had matches in his pocket. He drew one out and stood, for a moment, in trembling hesitancy, dreading what its light might disclose. Then he struck it, and there, almost at his feet, lay his cap, with his lamp still attached to it. He lighted the lamp and looked farther. At the other side of the entrance, half-hidden by the wreck of the door, he saw[120] Bennie, lying on his side, quite still. He bent down and flashed the light into Bennie’s face. As he did so the blind boy opened his eyelids, sighed, moved his hands, and tried to rise. “Tom!” The word came in a whisper from his lips. “Yes, Bennie, I’m here; are you hurt?” “No—yes—I don’t know; what was it, Tom?” “The fall, I guess. Can you get up? Here, I’ll help you.” Bennie gained his feet. He was not much hurt. The door had given way readily when the boys were forced against it, and so had broken the severity of the shock. But both lads had met with some cuts and some severe bruises. “Have you got a lamp, Tom?” “Yes; I just found it; come on, let’s go home.” Tom took Bennie’s hand and turned to go out, but the first step around the pillar, into the heading, brought him face to face with a wall of solid rock which filled every[121] inch of the passage. It had dropped, like a curtain, blotting out, in one instant, the mule and the cars, and forming an impassable barrier to the further progress of the boys in that direction. “We can’t get out this way,” said Tom; “we’ll have to go up through the airway.” They went back into the airway, and were met by a similar impenetrable mass. Then they went up into the short chambers beyond the airway, and Tom flashed the light of his lamp into every entrance, only to find it blocked and barred by the roof-rock from the fall. “We’ll have to go back up the headin’,” said Tom, at last, “an’ down through the old chambers, an’ out to the slope that way.” But his voice was weak and cheerless, for the fear of a terrible possibility had grown up in his mind. He knew that, if the fall extended across the old chambers to the west wall of the mine, as was more than likely, they were shut in beyond hope of escape, perhaps beyond hope of rescue; and if such were to be their fate, then it[122] would have been far better if they were lying dead under the fallen rock, with Billy and the cars. Hand in hand the two boys went up the heading, to the first opening in the lower wall, and creeping over the pile of “gob” that partially blocked the entrance, they passed down into a series of chambers that had been worked out years before, from a heading driven on a lower level. Striking across through the entrances, in the direction of the slope, they came, at last, as Tom had expected and feared, to the line of the fall: a mass of crushed coal and broken rock stretching diagonally across the range of chambers towards the heading below. But perhaps it did not reach to that heading; perhaps the heading itself was still free from obstruction! This was the only hope now left; and Tom grasped Bennie’s hand more tightly in his, and hurried, almost ran, down the long, wide chamber, across the airway and into the heading. They had gone scarce twenty rods along[123] the heading, when that cruel, jagged wall of rock rose up before them, marking the confines of the most cheerless prison that ever held a hopeless human being. When Tom saw it he stopped, and Bennie said, “Have we come to it, Tom?” Tom answered: “It’s there, Bennie,” and sank down upon a jutting rock, with a sudden weakness upon him, and drew the blind boy to a seat beside him. “We’re shut in, Bennie,” he said. “We’ll never get out till they break a way into us, and, maybe, by the time they do that, it’ll be—’twon’t be worth while.” Bennie clung tremblingly to Tom; but, even in his fright, it came into his mind to say something reassuring, and, thinking of his lonesome adventure on the day of the strike, he whispered, “Well, ’taint so bad as it might be, Tom; they might ’a’ been one of us shut up here alone, an’ that’d ’a’ been awful.” “I wish it had ’a’ been one of us alone,” answered Tom, “for Mommie’s sake. I wish it’d ’a’ been only me. Mommie[124] couldn’t ever stan’ it to lose—both of us—like—this.” For their own misfortune, these boys had not shed a tear; but, at the mention of Mommie’s name, they both began to weep, and, for many minutes, the noise of their sobbing and crying was the only sound heard in the desolate heading. Tom was the first to recover. A sense of the responsibility of the situation had come to him. He knew that strength was wasted in tears. And he knew that the greater the effort towards physical endurance, towards courage and manhood, the greater the hope that they might live until a rescuing party could reach them. Besides this, it was his place, as the older and stronger of the two, to be very brave and cheerful for Bennie’s sake. So he dried his tears, and fought back his terror, and spoke soothing words to Bennie, and even as he did so, his own heart grew stronger, and he felt better able to endure until the end, whatever the end might be. “God can see us, down in the mine, just[125] as well as He could up there in the sunlight,” he said to Bennie, “an’ whatever He’d do for us up there He’ll do for us down here. An’ there’s them ’at won’t let us die here, either, w’ile they’ve got hands to dig us out; an’ I shouldn’t wonder—I shouldn’t wonder a bit—if they were a-diggin’ for us now.” After a time, Tom concluded that he would pass up along the line of the fall, through the old chambers, and see if there was not some opening left through which escape would be possible. So he took Bennie’s hand again, and led him slowly up through the abandoned workings, in and out, to the face of the fall at every point where it was exposed, only to find, always, the masses of broken and tumbled rock, reaching from floor to roof. Yet not always! Once, as Tom flashed the lamp-light up into a blocked entrance, he discovered a narrow space between the top of the fallen rock and the roof, and, releasing Bennie’s hand, and climbing up to it, with much difficulty, he found that he[126] was able to crawl through into a little open place in the next chamber. From here he passed readily through an unblocked entrance into the second chamber, and, at some little distance down it, he found another open entrance. The light of hope flamed up in his breast as he crept along over the smooth, sloping surfaces of fallen rock, across one chamber after another, nearer and nearer to the slope, nearer and nearer to freedom, and the blessed certainty of life. Then, suddenly, in the midst of his reviving hope, he came to a place where the closest scrutiny failed to reveal an opening large enough for even his small body to force its way through. Sick at heart, in spite of his self-determined courage, he crawled back through the fall, up the free passages and across the slippery rocks, to where Bennie stood waiting. “I didn’t find any thing,” he said, in as strong a voice as he could command. “Come, le’s go on up.” He took Bennie’s hand and moved on. But, as he turned through an entrance into the next chamber, he was startled to see,[127] in the distance, the light of another lamp. The sharp ears of the blind boy caught the sound of footsteps. “Somebody’s comin’, Tom,” he said. “I see the lamp,” Tom answered, “but I don’t know who it can be. There wasn’t anybody in the new chambers w’en I started down with the load. All the men went out quite a bit ahead o’ me.” The two boys stood still; the strange light approached, and, with the light, appeared, to Tom’s astonished eyes, the huge form and bearded face of Jack Rennie. </div> <hr class="chap" /> [128] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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