Mountain Rampage by Graham Scott

Author:Graham, Scott [Graham, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781937226466
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-NINE

Chuck stilled his breathing.

A second cry echoed the length of the tunnel and down into the pit.

He aimed an ear toward the top of the shaft. When he heard a third shriek, he slumped in his harness, weak with relief.

Rosie was hollering his name.

“Chu-uck,” she screamed a fourth time, breaking his name into two syllables. Her cry was distinct this time; she’d entered the tunnel.

“There’s a hole!” he yelled back, terrified at the prospect of the girls scurrying ahead of Janelle and unknowingly coming upon the vertical shaft. “Careful!”

He peered upward. “Be careful!” he cried again.

Light from moving headlamp beams bounced off the back wall of the mine tunnel sixty feet above him, joining the steady glow of the floodlights.

“You hear me?” he hollered. “There’s a hole!”

Janelle’s voice came from above. “Chuck?”

“The hole I told you about, where Samuel fell,” he called to her. “You’ll see it ahead of you. Keep the girls back.”

A head with a headlamp attached poked over the edge of the shaft. “What are you doing down there?” Janelle asked.

“I’m almost done. I’ll be right up.”

Janelle’s head hovered over the edge of the shaft for a moment before it disappeared. He returned his attention to the problem before him.

He slid down the rope until he stood thigh-deep in the viscous black muck, his legs and feet instantly growing cold. He aimed his headlamp into the fissure. The white object was wedged, as before, where the crevice narrowed to nothing. And there, scattered in the crevice below the object, were light-colored sticks of various lengths and thicknesses.

Still attached to the rope, he edged sideways into the crevice. His back brushed the crevice wall, which collapsed onto his shoulders. The wet, black material dripped from his body and landed in the muck with wet plops.

He leaned into the crevice, his shoulders pressed against the fissure’s narrowing sides. As the walls fell against him, he closed his eyes and reached blindly for something smooth.

He swam his hand through the muck, up, down, sideways, until his fingers bounced off something solid. He dug his toes into the black gunk and shoved himself forward a few more inches. He stretched full out, the black material gathering around him, and took hold of the object, his fingers finding purchase in depressions in its rounded shape.

He held the object against his chest and pushed himself backward with his free hand until he was out of the crevice. Once more he was covered in muck, soaked to the skin, and freezing.

Before he could swipe the grit-covered lens of his headlamp clean to look at the prize grasped in his hand, the wall of the shaft in front of him gave way, raising the level of black muck to his waist.

He shoved the object down his shirt and shrugged his pack around to his front. He dug out his ascending devices, attached them to the rope, wrestled his boots into the loops hanging from the devices, and commenced the arduous climb up the rope, this

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