Dick stuck his candle in the soft clay, ran to Harry’s head, and lifted it from the water, and kneeling gazed intently into the cold white face.  He thought his friend dead.

‘Her father done it!’ he murmured.  ’Her father!  Her father!

He looked and listened for signs of life; he called Harry’s name again and again, and felt for the beating of his heart, having at the same time only a vague idea of the location of that organ.  He tried to lift the young man away, but his strength was not equal to the task; and so, after collecting some pieces of reef to keep Harry’s face above the water, he attempted to drag him out of the reach of the flood.  By putting forth all his power he contrived to draw his inanimate friend a few feet up the incline; then, by lifting the shoulders an inch or two at a time, he succeeded in turning Hardy right round with his head farthest from the rising stream.  The boy was now smothered from head to foot with yellow clay and his lustrous eyes shone from a face daubed with a puddled reef; and he crouched in the slurry of the drive holding Hardy’s head upon his knee, gazing intently into his face, muttering ever, in a half-puzzled way the same words: 

’Her father!  Her father!

The sound of a lump of reef falling from the roof somewhere far down the drive brought Dick sharply to his feet.  His work was not yet accomplished.  The scheme that had come to him without volition was nevertheless clearly set forth in his mind.  He started dragging at Hardy again, and gradually drew him to the ordinary level of the drive.  Once the water attained this height it would flow away towards the shaft, and do the young man no harm.  Dick feared Harry was dead; but he did not reason, he only obeyed the instinct that possessed him and that also bade him avoid the incoming shift.  If the men found him there he would have to tell all, and her father had done it—­her father!  A swift panic seized Dick; he snatched up his candle and ran back the way he had come.  It was hours, he imagined, since he lay listening to Rogers and Shine above the quarry, and he wondered that the night-shift men were not below long ere this.  He reached the balance shaft without having seen a man, and climbed swiftly to the upper level.  His race was continued along these workings to the jump-up.  Once in the Red Hand drive he was safe from discovery, but the feverish activity still possessed him.  How he climbed that fearful flight of ladders up the black wet shaft he never knew.  He remembered nothing of the agony of the toil the day after, when all seemed like a dream.