A voice calling his name from the top of the shaft brought Jack Kilmeny back to consciousness. He answered.
A shout of joy boomed down to him in Colter's heavy bass. He could hear, too, the sweet troubled tones of a woman.
"Hurry, please, hurry.... Thank God, we're in time."
"Got that breakfast with you, little neighbor," Jack called up weakly. He did not need to be told that Moya Dwight was above, and, since she was there, of course she had brought him the breakfast that he had ordered from the Silver Dollar.
"Get back into the tunnel, Jack," Colter presently shouted.
"What for?"
"We're lowering someone to you. The timberings are rotten and they might fall on you. Get back."
"All right."
Five minutes later the rescuer reached the foot of the shaft. He stood for a moment with a miner's lamp lifted above his head and peered into the gloom.
"Where away, Jack?"
The man was Ned Kilmeny. He and Lord Farquhar had returned to the hotel just after dinner. The captain had insisted--all the more because there was some danger in it--that he should be the man lowered to the aid of his cousin.
"Bring that breakfast?" Jack snapped, testily.
"Yes, old man. It's waiting up above. Brought some soup down with me."
"I ordered it two hours ago. What's been keeping you? I'm going to complain of the service."
The captain saw at once that Jack was lightheaded and he humored him.
"Yes, I would. Now drink this soup."
The imprisoned man drained the bucket to the last drop.
Ned loosened the rope from his own body and fastened it about that of his cousin. He gave the signal and Jack was hauled very carefully to the surface in such a way as not to collide with the jammed timbers near the top. Colter and Bleyer lifted the highgrader over the edge of the well, where he collapsed at once into the arms of his friend.
Moya, a flask in her hand, stooped over the sick man where he lay on the grass. Her fine face was full of poignant sympathy.
Kilmeny's mind was quite clear now. The man was gaunt as a famished wolf. Bitten deep into his face were the lines that showed how closely he had shaved death. But in his eye was the gay inextinguishable gleam of the thoroughbred.
"Ain't I the quitter, Miss Dwight? Keeling over just like a sick baby."
The young woman choked over her answer. "You mustn't talk yet. Drink this, please."
He drank, and later he ate sparingly of the food she had hastily gathered from the dinner table and brought with her. In jerky little sentences he sketched his adventure, mingling fiction with fact as the fever grew on him again.