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"Don't start me," he repeated in a voice so blurred that the words were hardly recognizable. He swallowed convulsively, his emotion mounting to an inchoate passion, when suddenly a change was evident. He made a short, violent effort to regain his self-control, his gaze fastened on a point behind Woolfolk. The latter turned and saw Millie Stope approaching, her countenance haggard with fear.
But I heard Dick shout from somewhere to 'chuck Stretton into Thompson's old stope! I thought it meant they'd killed you; that it was another man I'd let be murdered!" She caught her breath as if something stabbed her, and I know it stabbed me to think I was just "another man" to her. But I knelt steady.
He had found the elemental hush of the sea, the iron aloofness of rocky and uninhabited coasts, but he had never been able to still the dull rebellion within, the legacy of the past. A feeling of complete failure settled over him. His safety and freedom amounted to this that life had broken him and cast him aside. A long, hollow wail rose from the land, and Millie Stope moved sharply.
She reluctantly descended the stair, crossed the broken floor and disappeared through the door. A sudden unwillingness to have her return alone to the sobbing menace of Iscah Nicholas, the impotent wraith that had been Lichfield Stope, carried him in an impetuous stride to the stair. But there he halted.
And we can't 'it the vein without following the drift to the stope. But you're the one to make the decision." Again, a long moment; again, in memory, Fairchild was standing in a gloomy, old-fashioned room, reading a letter he had taken from a dusty safe. Finally his answer came: "He told me to go ahead, if necessary. And we 'll go, Harry."
A dim and moldering fragment of cotton stuff was hanging from a forgotten bolt; above, some tinware was eaten with rust; a scale had crushed in the floor and lay broken on the earth beneath; and a ledger, its leaves a single, sodden film of grey, was still open on a counter. A precarious stair mounted to the flooring above, and Millie Stope made her way upward, followed by Woolfolk.
He could secure one from the Gar, but even that short lapse of time might prove fatal to Millie or Lichfield Stope. Millie's story was patently fact in every detail. He thought more rapidly still desperately. "I must go back," she repeated, her words lost in a sudden blast of wind under the dilapidated roof. He saw that she was right. "Very well," he acquiesced.
I may want to get married some day, so I don't want to take any chances." The mining engineer looked at him blankly for a moment, then threw back his head and laughter rolled out until it seemed to fill the stope. Hanlon watched the other's mind clear itself of all suspicion ... at least for the time being. Philander rested his hand companionably on the younger man's shoulder.
The winter arrives for good at La Chance in November, and besides the exposed tunnel mouth, there was no shelter over the ore platform at the mill. This year the snow was late, but there was no counting on that. And I blinked as I went out of the white November sunshine into Macartney's new tunnel, and the candlelight of his humming stope.
The sailor was nowhere visible; but, in an intermittent, reddish light that faded and swelled as the cabin door swung open and shut, Woolfolk saw a white figure clinging to the wheel Millie. Instantly his hands replaced hers on the spokes and, as if with a palpable sigh of relief, the Gar steadied to her course. Millie Stope clung to the deck rail, sobbing with exhaustion.
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