Two Thousand Miles Below by Charles Willard Diffin (whitelam books TXT) 📗
- Author: Charles Willard Diffin
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"It did," said Rawson. Then the flame-thrower fell from his nerveless hand. He was swaying; his knees were trembling with weakness when Smithy and Loah, on either side, took his burned arms tenderly and helped him on where the others had gone.
Colonel Culver and a rescue party met them halfway. The Colonel had seen his men safely to the bottom of the volcanic pit. Others had run from their station beside a field gun to meet them; then Culver had called for volunteers and had gone back. And now there were plenty of willing arms to help.
he big lift, with its platforms of metal plates, awaited them at the tunnel's end. There was room on it now for all who were left; there was no crowding of men's bodies as there had been on the downward passage. Rawson was stretched on the floor-plates, whose touch was cool to his tortured body. Loah was seated that his head might rest in her lap on that absurd little fragment of skirt. She bent above him, whispering brokenly: "Dean-San—my dear—my own Dean-San! We live, Dean-San. I can scarcely believe it, but I know that we live, for I still have you."
But Dean was able to stand when that journey was done. First, though, there were men who placed him carefully on a stretcher and carried him, when he commanded, to the crater's outer rim. On the ashy floor of the crater a big transport was waiting with idling motors, but Dean would not let them put him inside. He wanted to look out across the world, to see it in reality as he had seen it in his own mind when all hope was gone. He wanted to look out once more across Tonah Basin and let his eyes rest upon country he had known.
Loah and Smithy walked beside him, as the first-aid men carried him toward that distant rim. The rocks there were cleft—it was the place where he first had seen the inside of the crater's cup. There he had them put him down; and, with the help of Loah and Smithy, he got slowly to his feet. While they lifted him, he wondered at the sound in this desert world where no sound should be. A terrific rushing, an endless roar—and then his eyes found the clouds of steam.
elow him was the Basin, the tangled wreckage of his camp. And there, where the derrick had stood, was a tall plume of white. It did not begin close to the ground—superheated steam, until it cools and condenses to water vapor, is invisible—but a hundred feet above the sand. And, from there on up, two thousand feet sheer into the air, was a straight shaft of vapor, rolling up for another thousand feet into billowing clouds that the afternoon sun turned to glorious white.
"Power!" gasped Rawson. "Power—and it will be like that indefinitely!" Then he laughed weakly. "I had to go down there to do it, to make Erickson richer, but it was worth it. In there the ocean will slowly subside. Gor and his people will find their lost lands; the column of water in the shaft will hold the back-pressure of steam. And here, I have Loah, and that's all—but that's enough!"
He put one arm, still with the bandages of the first-aid men, about the girl. "I hope you'll be happy, dear," he said softly, and turned back. But Smithy barred the way.
"That isn't all," said Smithy jubilantly. "You see, Dean, Erickson fired you—Erickson thought you had run out on him. Instead of backing you up, he quit. So I bought them all out. Whatever is there, Dean—and it's worth more millions than I dare to think about—you own half of! Now get back on that stretcher. Just because you've saved all our necks up here on top of the earth, you mustn't think you can keep an Army ship waiting all day!"
(The End.) End of Project Gutenberg's Two Thousand Miles Below, by Charles Willard Diffin
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