Johnny bared his teeth in the darkness. “I’m not either, but there are still some questions I’m going to ask you... when we’re where I can see your face.”
“You’ve still got some matches, haven’t you?” Helen challenged.
Johnny reached into his pocket, felt for the paper book. He found it and brought it out of his pocket. His fingers told him, however, that there was one lone match in it. He folded the book and returned it to his pocket. There might be a more urgent need for a match later.
“No,” he said, “I used the last one when I relit the lamp.”
“You fool!” cried Helen Walker in sudden anger.
Johnny accepted the designation. “I guess you’re right.”
“Now, wait a minute, Johnny,” said Sam Cragg, alarm in his voice. “If we ever get out of here it’s you that’ll have to find the way, Johnny — not me. Don’t go giving up.”
“I’m not,” said Johnny. “Not yet.”
Suddenly he reached out in the darkness. “Helen?” he asked, sharply. “Where are you?”
“Here,” replied her voice — from some distance away.
He started in the direction he thought her voice came from. But he stopped after a few feet. “Where?” he called.
“Over here,” her voice replied — and seemed farther away than ever.
Muttering, he turned back swiftly, and collided with Sam Gragg.
“This is me,” Sam exclaimed.
“Hang onto me,” Johnny ordered. “Helen!” he called again.
For a moment there was no reply at all. Then her voice called, fainter than before: “Yes!”
“Don’t move!” Johnny cried. “Stay where you are and I’ll find you.”
“All right,” was her reply.
Sam was clutching Johnny’s arm and together they moved a few feet. “Answer now,” Johnny said.
“I’m here,” came her voice.
A cold sweat broke out over Johnny’s body. He was sure now that she was in an altogether different direction than the one in which he had been moving.
“Hold on,” he advised Sam in a whisper. Then he moved carefully one step, two, and reaching out, touched a wall. He made a careful about face, paced off three steps and touched the opposite wall. Then he made a right face and with Sam holding onto his arm, went a dozen counted steps.
“Now where are you?” he called.
“Johnny!” Helen’s voice came faintly — and hysterically. “You’re farther away than ever.”
Johnny swore softly. “All right,” he cried, “I’ll stand still and you come toward me. I’ve gotten mixed up, somehow...”
There was silence for a long moment. Then Johnny could stand it no longer. “Are you coming?”
There was no reply!
“Helen!” Johnny roared at the top of his voice. “Where are you?”
“Here!” came a faint, a very faint reply.
In sudden panic, Johnny sprang forward and collided with the tunnel wall so hard that his head spun for a moment. When it cleared, he tried yelling again.
Sam took it up, bellowing at the top of his voice. The sound echoed and re-echoed through the tunnels, but there was no reply.
Helen Walker was lost.
So were they, for that matter, but there is something less terrifying if two people are together when lost.
Johnny and Sam made desperate attempts to find her. They paced off distances, returned and went in the opposite direction. They found side tunnels, venturing into them. They called and they listened. Once or twice they thought they heard faint cries and immediately went in the direction from which they believed the sound came. But it was never repeated — at least not from the same direction.
Time went by. Neither Johnny nor Sam had watches, but Johnny guessed that two or three hours had elapsed since they had entered the tunnel. It would be evening up on top of the earth.
“Let’s face it, Sam,” Johnny said. “Shall we sit down and wait for it, or shall we keep moving... until we drop?”
“How big can a mine like this be?” Sam exclaimed.
“I don’t know. I know very little about mines. Sure, I’ve read about them, but never had any particular reason to remember the details. I seem to have some recollection, though, of reading that these old-time mines sometimes had miles of tunnels...”
“But they’ve got to end somewhere, don’t they?” Sam cried. “Don’t mines have limits?”
“Not especially. The old rule is that a mine can follow a vein, no matter where it leads — as long as it begins on its own property.” He scowled in the inky blackness. “It’s the damn cross-tunnels that get me.”
“How many of those can there be?”
“Hundreds.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I’m not sure of anything,” said Johnny. “Let me think; it seems I read once that claims were only a hundred feet wide. Yet, I remember somewhere else something about fifteen hundred feet... Must be different rules for different states. Wait a minute... When we were up top, how far did it seem to Henderson’s place?”
“About a half mile.”
“All right, say a half mile, then — that’s saying this mine runs all the way to the edge of the Henderson one; we’re not sure of that, but let’s count it the worst way and say that it does. That’s roughly two thousand five hundred feet... and these crosscut tunnels seem to pop up every sixty or seventy feet; let’s give ourselves the worst of it and say fifty feet; that should be two every hundred feet... fifty tunnels at the outside, not counting the ten feet or so that each tunnel occupies. So there couldn’t possibly be more than fifty crosscut tunnels, probably only thirty-five or forty. And let’s say each one runs a half mile — which I doubt. Fifty times a half mile, that would be twenty-five miles. Shall we try them — one after the other, to the end, then back...” Johnny swore. “I forgot the back-trail each time. That doubles everything. All right, fifty miles.”
“Fifty miles in the dark,” Sam said, bitterly. “Let’s get moving... But what are we looking for?”
“Helen Walker,” Johnny said.
“And after we find her?”
“The elevator.”
“And what if it’s up?”
“Let’s talk about that when we find it... At least we’ll have light then; there was plenty of carbide in that can.”
“It’s no good without a match to light it.”
“I’ve got a match — one match. I was saving it for emergencies.”
They started out in the darkness, arms locked together, their free hands stretched out to touch walls, against which they bumped repeatedly, for in the blackness their feet could not travel in straight lines, even if the tunnels did sometimes run fairly straight.
They stumbled along in silence for some minutes, when they encountered a cross-shaft. Johnny called a halt and he grimly measured the distance across the tunnel in which they had been traveling. He did it by getting down on the floor and measuring with his arms, then with a sliver from one of the shoring beams that he pried loose.
He came to the conclusion that the tunnel in which they had been traveling was about six feet wide, or roughly three lengths of the piece of wood. He crawled carefully then to the new tunnel and measured it.
“Eight feet!” he announced exultantly. “It must be the main tunnel.”
“Let’s go!” cried Sam Cragg.
They went blithely down the new tunnel, but had proceeded less than fifty feet when they came abruptly to a cave-in — either a cave-in, or the end of the digging. They tested it to the ceiling, found it solid, then hopefully turned and began retracing their steps, figuring that the new direction would bring them back to the elevators. A hundred feet brought them up against a solid wall.
“What the hell!” cried Johnny.
Sam Cragg groaned.