"First thing we see was Juno trotting towards us, and she looked up and
whined, and then trotted back to a place where it was plain enough, now
we knew, a great bit of the side had caved down and made a slope, and
here Juno began scratching hard, and as fast as she scratched the more
sand come down.
"I looked, at Old Brownsmith's brother, and he looked at me, and we
jumped out, slipped off our coats and weskits, took a shovel apiece, and
began to throw the sand away.
"My head was all of a buzz, for every shovelful I threw out I seemed to
see your white gal's face staring at me and asking of me to work harder,
and I did work like a steam-engyne.
"Then, one by one, eight men come up, and we set 'em all at work; but
Old Brownsmith's brother, the ganger, you know, stops us after a bit.
"`This is no use!' he says; `we're only burying of 'em deeper.' "Right he was, for the sand kept crumbling down from the top as soon as
ever we made a bit of space below, and twice over some one called out
`Warning!' and we had to run back to keep from being buried, while I
got in right up to the chest once.
"`There's hundreds o' tons loose,' says the old--the ganger, you know;
`and we shall never get in that way.' He stopped to think, but it made
me mad, for I knowed you must be in there, and I began digging again,
wondering how it was that Juno hadn't found you before, and 'sposed the
sand didn't hold the scent, or else the rabbits up above 'tracted her
away.
"`I can see no other way,' said the ganger at last. `You must dig, my
lads. Go on. I'll get on the top, and see how much more is loose.
Take care. You,' he said to a tall, thin lad of sixteen--`you stand
there; and as soon as you see any sand crumbling down, you shout.' "The men began to dig again, and at the end of a minute the lad shouted,
and we had to scuttle off, or we should have been buried, and things
looked worse than ever. We'd been digging and shovelling back the
sloping bank, but it grew instead of getting less, and this made me
obstint as I dug away as hard as I could get my shovel down.
"All at once I hears a shout from the ganger. `Come up here, Ike,' he
says; and I shouldered my spade, and had to go a good bit round 'fore I
could climb up to him, and I found him twenty or thirty foot back from
the edge, among some furze.