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Then there was silence for Harry had left the fissure to go into the stope and make an investigation. A long moment and he was back, almost creeping, and whispering as he reached the end of the fissure. "Come 'ere both of you! Come 'ere!" "What is it?" "Sh-h-h-h-h-h. Don't talk too loud. We 've been blessed with luck already. Come 'ere." He led the way, the man and woman following him.
They approached the dwelling from behind the orange grove; and, coming suddenly to the porch, surprised an incredibly thin, grey man in the act of lighting a small stone pipe with a reed stem. He was sitting, but, seeing Woolfolk, he started sharply to his feet, and the pipe fell, shattering the bowl. "My father," the woman pronounced: "Lichfield Stope."
He stopped abruptly, was silent for a tempestuous moment, and then baldly repeated the fact of his love. Millie Stope said: "I know so little about the love you mean." Her voice trailed to silence; and in a lull of the storm they heard the thin patter of rats on the floor below, the stir of bats among the rafters. "It's quickly learned," he assured her.
There once more they clambered through the hole in the cave-in and on toward the beginning of the stope. And there they pointed out their discovery. A wait for the remainder of that day, a day that seemed ages long, a day in which Robert Fairchild found himself facing the editor of the Bugle, and telling his story, Harry beside him.
And it was not until late in the night after the rescue, following a few hours of rest forced upon him by the interne, that Fairchild once more could converse with his stricken partner. "It's something I 'll 'ave to show you to explain," said Harry. "I can't tell you about it. You know where that little fissure is in the 'anging wall, away back in the stope?" "Yes." "Well, that's it.
Somebody running, slipping, with a hideous clatter of stones was coming down the long passage Collins called his back door. "Macartney," said I, "and Charliet's given us away!" And with the words in my mouth I had Paulette around the waist and shoved out of sight behind the boulder that separated Collins's cave from his tunnel and the pierced wall of Thompson's stope.
He brushed Dunn and Collins aside like flies and grabbed my arm. "Come out," he panted. "Sacré damn, bring Mademoiselle Paulette and come out! It is that Marcia! She sees you in the shack last night; sees you alive and out of Thompson's stope where they buried you carrying Mademoiselle away!
She sat with her slender knees crossed, her fine arms held with hands clasped behind her head, and clad in a crisply ironed, crude white dress, into the band of which she had thrust a spray of orange blossoms. John Woolfolk was increasingly conscious of her peculiar charm. Millie Stope, he suddenly realized, was like the wild oranges in the neglected grove at her door.
There was not one single thing he had done to me, Paulette, or any one else that I did not put a name to. And I trusted Macartney, or any man he had left in the ink-dark stope, would be fool enough to jump at me for what I said. But no one jumped. And out of the graveyard blackness in front of me came a muffled chuckle! It rooted me stone still, and I dare swear it would have you.
Rooted juniper hung down over it in an impervious curtain, as it hung everywhere from the rocks at La Chance. Collins pushed it aside, and the two of us were out out of Thompson's stope, where Macartney had meant me to lie till I died! For two breaths I did not know where I was. It was still snowing, and the night was wild, such a night as we might not have again for weeks.
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