Not so Peter—­who with a joyous “Didn’t I tell you the boy would keep his promise—­” sprang from his chair, nearly upsetting the chess-board in his eagerness to hear from Jack, an eagerness shared by Ruth, whose voice again rang out, this time in an anxious tone,

“Hurry up, Uncle Peter—­is he coming?”

Peter made no answer; he was staring straight at the open slip, his face deathly pale, his hand trembling.

“I’ll tell you all about it in a minute, dear,” he said at last with a forced smile.  Then he touched Morris’s arm and the two left the room.

CHAPTER XIV

The Scribe would willingly omit this chapter.  Dying men, hurrying doctors, improvised stretchers made of wrenched fence rails; silent, slow-moving throngs following limp, bruised bodies,—­are not pleasant objects to write about and should be disposed of as quickly as possible.

Exactly whose fault it was nobody knew; if any one did, no one ever told.  Every precaution had been taken each charge had been properly placed and tamped; all the fulminates inspected and the connections made with the greatest care.  As to the battery—­that was known to be half a mile away in the pay shanty, lying on Jack Breen’s table.

Nor was the weather unfavorable.  True, there had been rain the day before, starting a general thaw, but none of the downpour had soaked through the outer crust of the tunnel to the working force inside and no extra labor had devolved on the pumps.  This, of course, upset all theories as to there having been a readjustment of surface rock, dangerous sometimes, to magnetic connections.

Then again, no man understood tunnel construction better than Henry MacFarlane, C.E., Member of the American Society of Engineers, Fellow of the Institute of Sciences, etc., etc.  Nor was there ever an engineer more careful of his men.  Indeed, it was his boast that he had never lost a life by a premature discharge in the twenty years of his experience.  Nor did the men, those who worked under him—­those who escaped alive—­come to any definite conclusion as to the cause of the catastrophe:  the night and day gang, I mean,—­those who breathed the foul air, who had felt the chill of the clammy interior and who were therefore familiar with the handling of explosives and the proper tamping of the charges —­a slip of the steel meaning instantaneous annihilation.

The Beast knew and could tell if he chose.

I say “The Beast,” for that is what MacFarlane’s tunnel was to me.  To the passer-by and to the expert, it was, of course, merely a short cut through the steep hills flanking one end of the huge “earth fill” which MacFarlane was constructing across the Corklesville brook, and which, when completed would form a road-bed for future trains; but to me it was always The Beast.