At the other side of the entrance, half-hidden by the wreck of the door, he saw 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.
The word came in a whisper from his lips.
"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.
"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 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 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.