Chapter 6
Troy couldn’t believe it. What a couple of days!
One moment he’d been worrying about his love life and how to sort that mess out, and now here he was facing a whole new set of problems. His friends were stuck in a hole that he, his brother, and Andrew had convinced them all would be a lucrative and exciting adventure.
Some adventure it was. They had all known that a cave-in was possible. It was always a possibility with a mine, but they had been careful. They had gone slowly, tried to make sure that nothing was left to chance—and yet things had gone wrong.
And the more Troy looked at the damage, the piles of rocks blocking the entrance, the more uncertain he was of what had caused it. Could a simple cave-in be this destructive? Or had something else happened?
Now they were trapped behind who knew how much rock and running out of time. They’d gotten rid of all the elevator wreckage, but the rocks were proving impossible to move.
He went to find Andrew.
He was standing at a hastily set up coffee table, stirring his mug with a tired, far-off look on his face. As Troy approached, two women got there before him. One was Andrea, and the other was Milly Cole. She was seventeen, and her father, Max, was down in the mine.
“We want to know what progress you’ve made,” Andrea demanded of Andrew.
He turned to her.
“Clearly this isn’t working,” Andrea said hotly. “We’ve been clearing and clearing and lifting and dragging for hours, and we have nothing. No one has come out of that hole except for two people. What is going on?”
“We’re trying our—” Andrew began.
“Your best?” Andrea screamed. “Well, that isn’t good enough! What about poor Milly here? If Max doesn’t come up, that’s it! She has no more family. You want that on your conscience? How could you send men down into that mine without making sure it was safe?”
Milly was crying, her shoulders shaking.
“See! Find the men! Make another plan! Hurry!” Andrea demanded and then, taking Milly by the hand, stalked off.
Troy watched them go. Everyone watched, and Andrew seemed to sag.
He was about to go to his friend when a hand touched his shoulder, and Troy jumped.
Lizzy was standing beside him. She wore a half-crazed grin on her face.
He frowned in surprise. It had been hours since he last saw her, his attention primarily focused on clearing rubble and, reluctantly, keeping an eye on Emily.
He had to admit she’d done well in spite of the chaos she’d unwittingly walked into.
“Liz?”
“Troy,” she said, her grin growing into a smile as broad as he’d ever seen on her beautiful face. “I had an idea. We can save them if we can just?—”
“How?” That was Andrew. He came striding over, coffee mug in hand.
Lizzy’s eyes sparkled with excitement as she spoke. “The air shafts,” she said quickly. “If we can find out where everyone is in the mine … and if they’re close to an air shaft …”
Troy immediately guessed where she was going with things. “That big air shaft we sank,” Troy realized. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“We could move the hoist to that hole and pull them out that way,” she went on. “Making that hole bigger won’t take anywhere near as long as anything else we’ve got happening.”
Troy laughed and slapped his thigh. “If you aren’t a genius, then I don’t know what one is.
” He beamed at Lizzy, and she smiled, her cheeks turning pretty pink underneath layers of sweat and grime.
In the back of his tired mind, he thought to himself that he’d rather all that dirt than any amount of the face paint women seemed to increasingly wear in this day and age.
“Well, let’s get on it,” Andrew said. Then he paused. “Hang on. Before we take everyone over there and possibly lose valuable time—you go and see if you can find them. Then we’ll move the manpower. We’ll keep working to clear this, just in case.”
Troy and Lizzy nodded and hurried through the camp.
“Where are you going?” Julie asked. She was tending to someone with Emily beside her, holding things.
“What’s going on?” Andrea demanded. Others took up the cry as well, and Lizzy was suddenly waylaid by a big man. Eugene Tate hadn’t been on shift, and he seemed to feel that he was paying some price for not being stuck in the mine with the others.
He loomed in front of her. “Where are you going? We need to know. Why ain’t anybody workin’ the winch?”
“Not now, Eugene,” Troy said. “We might have the answer.”
“What is it?” he demanded.
“We’ll tell you the moment we find out if it will work,” Lizzy said. “Now please, don’t stop us. Let us go.”
“Oh, can I help?” Emily asked eagerly.
Troy couldn’t think how she could. He couldn’t think how any of them could help right now. He turned and, in an angry voice, said, “Any of you engineers?”
A lot of shaking heads met his question.
“Then, no, you can’t help right now. In a minute, maybe, but for now, we need to go!
If you want to send someone to man the winch, go ahead.
Lizzy’s needed elsewhere right now.” He turned and marched off, breaking into a run.
A moment later, Lizzy caught up, running alongside him.
Troy felt like an ogre. He just couldn’t seem to find the right thing to say to all those hopeful faces. Especially Emily’s. She’d been halfway to her feet when he glared at her, and she’d frozen before sitting again.
“You’re really not good with her,” Lizzy said, not breaking her long stride. “Emily, I mean.”
“Should I be?” he asked as they rounded some bushes. “We had nothing to say to each other when we were writing those blasted letters, and now there’s even less. She shouldn’t have come out here, Lizzy. I told her not to!”
Lizzy’s expression filled with compassion as they jogged on. “I know. I was just thinking we should at least try with her. She’s doing her best, Troy.”
“I’m trying too,” he muttered, putting on a burst of speed.
She kept up easily with him even though he knew she’d been on her feet most of the night, working the winch she’d engineered. “Try harder, Troy. And I will too. Deal?”
They stopped beside the air shaft, and she placed a bloodied hand on his arm. He could feel the blisters on her palms and winced at the destruction to her nails. “Deal?” she repeated. “I’ll try to be nice to her if you are too.”
“Deal,” he agreed, in large part because that meant he could shake her hand, which he did far more gently than usual, careful not to pop the large blisters.
For a long moment they stared at each other, and time seemed to stop like it always did whenever he looked into Lizzy’s eyes. Then she cleared her throat and stepped back.
“Hey, listen. Do you hear that?”
He listened carefully and swore he could just make out voices coming from the air shaft.
They had an echoing quality to them, and they weren’t very loud, but they sure did sound human.
Dropping to their knees, they both tried to get their heads in the air shaft opening at the same time. It wasn’t big enough for that, and they collided.
“Ouch!” Lizzy cried, holding her head. Probably the first time all night she’d complained about an injury.
Troy grimaced. “Sorry.” He leaned into the air shaft and shouted, “Hey, fellows! You down there?”
“We’re here!” came an almost immediate answering cry. “We’re here!! Hey, everyone! They’ve found us! We’re here!”
Other voices joined the first, and Troy pulled his head out of the hole and collapsed onto his back. The tension, the fear, and the stress of the last couple of days drained out of him and he lay beside the hole on his back, laughing almost manically.
“Get up!” Lizzy toed him with her boot. “They’re not safe yet. We have work to do.”
She grabbed his hand, not nearly as gently as he’d held hers, and hauled him upright. Then they ran back to camp so fast they almost fell over when they pulled up short, immediately surrounded by women who wanted answers.
“We found them,” Troy said, holding up his hands to fend people off. “I don’t know what state they’re in, but they were able to call up to us. And it sure sounded like a big group is down there. We need pickaxes, food, water, medical supplies, and the hoist.”
In minutes, the whole camp was mobilized once more. Soon, folks were up at the air shaft. Supplies were lowered to the men to tide them over another few hours, and then the sound of pickaxes rang through the air as the air shaft was widened enough for the men to pass through.
By the time an injured Douglas, the first of the trapped miners, emerged, it was late afternoon.
Then the rest of the miners came up out of the hole, one by one.
And what a miracle it was—every single remaining miner emerged relatively unscathed, with not one fatality in the terrible accident.
Bloodied, bruised, and many holding broken arms or legs, they still all wore large smiles as their heads cleared the rim of the air shaft opening.
Family members flocked to them, wrapping their arms around the men, kissing filthy faces and holding bloodied and scraped hands.
Jeff smiled broadly as he emerged. He had a nasty-looking cut on his head, a few scrapes down his arms and back that had bled through his shirt, and what looked like a painfully swollen wrist.
Troy went to help him. “You look dreadful.”
“Well, you look like salvation, buddy,” Jeff said, allowing Troy to support him.
“Salvation is the Lord’s doing, not mine,” Troy replied. “What happened? What caused the cave-in?”
Andrew noticed his brother was out of the hole and came storming over, wrapping his arms around him.
“Jeff! You’re okay!”
“I won’t be if you don’t let go,” Jeff said in a strained voice.
“You’ll crack my remaining unbroken ribs.
We don’t know what happened,” Jeff added, speaking over his brother’s shoulder to Troy.
“One moment, everything seemed fine, and then, boom. The roof fell on our heads. By God’s grace, a couple of us got this funny feeling right before things blew and warned us all to run. ”
Troy said a prayer of thanks and nodded. It would need some thinking to work out what had happened, but he was just glad for the time being that everyone had come out of the hole alive.
He and Kyle went to fetch the cart to carry the injured men back to camp.
By nightfall, everyone was exhausted, but all the miners were accounted for.
As they sat around the fire that evening, Troy watched Lizzy as folks came over and shook her hand, thanking her profusely. Even Carl’s mother and father came over.
“Thank you,” Meredith Jurgen said. “I’m sorry about earlier.”
Lizzy shook her head. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We all have bad days. I was just lucky today wasn’t one of mine.”
“She is quite something,” Emily said, walking up to Troy.
She was holding a mug of coffee in her hands, and she looked tired.
Her golden hair was slipping from its fastenings, and she had dirt on her cheeks.
There was a stain of blood on her hands.
“Oh, it’s not that bad,” Emily said as he eyed her uncertainly.
“One of the men had a head wound that opened when we tried to examine him. It bled everywhere.”
Troy nodded. “Head wounds. You can’t trust them to bleed only the appropriate amount.” He said it dryly, meaning it as a joke.
For a moment there was a shocked, uncertain silence between them and then Emily smiled and chuckled. “That was a joke, right?” she asked.
Troy nodded again. “Yes, it was.”
“Hurrah!” Emily said, raising her hands in a gesture of celebration and almost spilling her coffee over herself. “I understood one of your jokes.”
“Well done,” Troy deadpanned.
She eyed him, but he grinned, and she grinned too. “Another one.”
“Oh, he’s full of those.” Lizzy walked over. “You have to watch Troy. He has the driest sense of humor I have ever come across.” She smiled and clinked mugs with Emily. “Well done today. You were a trooper, Emily.”
“Just trying to do my part,” Emily said, beaming but looking a little self-conscious.
The pretentious look she had arrived with seemed to have disappeared, thank goodness.
“I know my showing up was more of an inconvenience than I realized it would be before I got here. You’re all being so kind about it. ”
“Well, we can hardly strap you to a horse and send you out into the night,” Troy said.
Lizzy sighed and shook her head. “Enough, Troy! You’ll have her thinking you’re serious. He wasn’t,” she quickly added, in case Emily misunderstood.
“It’s all right,” Emily said. “I’m learning.”
“Emily,” Michael said as he came over to them. “I was wondering if you would like to come and talk to Andrew about that school you want to build.”
She smiled quite happily at the sight of Michael and went with him.
This left Troy and Lizzy. They looked at each other, and Troy thought that in the light of the torches and the campfire, Lizzy was possibly the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
No, that was a lie; she was beautiful in any light.
“Liz!”
Tim walked over and took his sister’s hand. “I want to show you something.”
Troy watched brother and sister go. He felt happy and completely at ease.
It was a strange feeling, and not one that he was accustomed to at all.
Since coming to this place, there had been so many unsettling and dangerous things that had happened, not least of which were the flood, the bandits moving through the area, and now, the cave-in.
There hadn’t been much time to sit back and find happiness within himself.
Emily, Michael, and Andrew sat across the fire from him. Troy watched his brother and Emily. Was there something there? Perhaps if he was better at this, he would see it for sure, but he felt there was a hint of attraction between them.
Michael had his body half turned toward Emily, seemingly fully focused on her gaze.
She leaned in as though to be close to him.
It might just be so that she could hear Andrew speaking, but Troy thought, or perhaps hoped, that Emily would find happiness.
He knew it wouldn’t ever be with him. It would take them weeks, if not months, just to build up to friendship, and even then, he was certain there wouldn’t be more.
Not when his heart was so completely full of Lizzy.
Even now, as Tim held out something to Lizzy in his hand and brother and sister inspected it by the firelight, she was lovely.
Her smile was warm and bright, her eyes sparkling.
It was all Troy could do not to rush over there, grab her in his arms, and profess his undying love.
He had a feeling his brother would have more than something to say if he did that when he had agreed, only a day ago, to at least try with Emily.
He wouldn’t try to fall in love with her though. He would just try to be her friend.
With that thought, he drained his mug, said a few more prayers of deepest gratitude for the multiple miracles of the rescue, then staggered off to bed.