Cruelly broken and bruised, Young, Bill Dancing, and Glover late that
night were brought up in rope cradles by the wrecking derrick and taken
into the Brock car, turned by its owner into a hospital. An hour after
the fall on the south arête the hill blockade had been broken. With
word of the disaster to nerve men already strained to the utmost,
effort became superhuman, the impossible was achieved, and the relief
train run in on the mine track.
Morris Blood, unconscious, was lifted from the narrow shelf at four
o'clock and put under a surgeon's care in time to save his life. To
rig a tackle for a three-hundred-foot lift was another matter; but even
while the derrick-car stood idle on the spur waiting for the cable
equipment from the mine, a laughing boy of a surgeon from the hospital
was lowered with the first of the linemen to the snow-field where the
three men roped together had fallen, and surgical aid reached them
before sunset.
Last to come up, because he still gave the orders, Glover, cushioned
and strapped in the tackle, was lifted out of the blackness of the
night into the streaming glare of the headlights. Very carefully he
was swung down to the mattresses piled on the track, and, before all
that looked and waited, a woman knelt and kissed his sunken eyes. Not
then did the men, dim in the circle about them, show what they felt,
though they knew, to the meanest trackhand, all it meant; not when,
after a bare moment of hesitation, Gertrude's father knelt opposite on
the mattress-pile, did they break their silence, though they shrewdly
guessed what that meant.
But when Glover pulled together his disordered members and at
Gertrude's side walked without help to the step of the car, the murmur
broke into a cheer that rang from Pilot to Glen Tarn.
"It was more than half my fault," he breathed to her, after his broken
arms had been set and the long gash on his head stitched. "I need not
have lost my balance if I had kept my head. Gertrude, I may as well
admit it--I'm a coward since I've begun to love you. I've never told
you how I saw your face once between the curtains of an empty sleeper.
But it came back to me just as Dancing's shoulder slipped--that's why I
went. I'm done forever with long chances." And she, silent, tried
only to quiet him while the car moved down the gap bearing them from
Pilot together.
"Do you know what day to-morrow is?" Gertrude was opening a box of
flowers that Solomon had brought from the express-office; Glover,
plastered with bandages, was standing before the grate fire in the
hotel parlor.
"To-morrow?" he echoed. "Sunday."
"Sunday! Why do you always guess Sunday when I ask you what day it is?"