CHAPTER V
One night, several years later, the child was awakened with, “Bushy, Bushy! oh, Bushy! wake up, dear! that’s a good girl.”
Bushy sleepily turned over in her little bed, which was just then shared with Rover, to see Tom, with an anxious face, bending over her.
“Why, what’s the matter, Tom?” said she, sleepily, sitting up in bed, striving with all her might to keep her eyes wide open by rubbing her brown knuckles into them. Tom had been very ill with the mountain fever, the sickness most dreaded by all the miners. Bushy had been deputized as his nurse, and most faithfully indeed had she performed her duties.
“The Padre hasn’t come home from the mine yet, and neither has Shanks,” exclaimed Tom. “I am afraid something is wrong. It is nearly ten o’clock and I want you to go up the trail with me.”
“All right,” said Bushy, jumping down from the bunk; “I’ll be ready in a jiffy.” She was wide awake now, for anything that touched upon her father’s safety made her little heart thump like a trip-hammer.
“Don’t you worry, Tom,” she said, swinging her arm back to reach the other sleeve of her tiny buffalo coat; “Padre’s all right. I expect he and Shanks had to stay awhile and help the men out. You know they said this morning at breakfast that they would have to timber that new drift where they struck that rich vein, or they would be having a cave-in.”
“‘GO ’WAY, SHANKS; YOU TALKED LOUD, TOO.’”
“That’s just it,” replied Tom. “I’m afraid there has been a cave-in.”
“Oh, no,” answered Bushy, assuringly; “but I’ll go over and see. I’ll bet my head that your fever’s worse, ’cause you have worried,” she added, rising from the floor, where she had been sitting wrapping her feet in some pieces of gunny sack and tying them about with short ropes. Then she noticed that Tom was trying to put on his coat.
“Why, Tom, you can’t go! You can’t walk yet. I am not afraid, and it is colder than Greenland.”
Tom had been sick for two weeks, and had been out of bed just one day. To all his urging that he had better go with her, Bushy scornfully replied that she wasn’t a “Tenderfoot,” and that he must stay and be ready to help in the shanty if anything had really happened.
She went out and saddled Ned. She threw on a blanket and strapped it tight, then bridled him and away they ran.
Tom stood in the doorway looking after her till the light of the lantern gleamed like a tiny fire-fly. It finally disappeared with its brave little bearer, behind a clump of snarled and twisted cedars which grew along the side of the trail up the steep mountain side.
“Too bad,” thought Tom, as he staggered once more to the fire-place and sat down. “I’m no good. I could not have gone ten yards without falling. Perhaps after all the men are staying extra late to finish that propping.”
Bushy galloped on, swinging the lantern high, then low, calling out, then waiting for some reply. In spite of the warm mittens her fingers were beginning to tingle. She was used to having her father stay over supper-time, yet she always bore in mind his danger; how he was constantly taking his life in his own hands, going down deep shafts in a bucket, working in long dark tunnels with only the light of a candle to guide him. Bushy at this time was nine years old, and she had been over the trail so often that she thought, if obliged to do it she could go the way blindfolded. But soon came a great surprise for her. Turning one of the sharp corners in the path everything was odd and strange. She rubbed her eyes to see if she were really awake. Where was the mine? She looked back to see if she had come the right way. Yes, she would know the great pine from which the mine received its name, anywhere. Only last week she had climbed to its very top. What on earth was the matter? Where was the mine? Where was the tool-shed? She saw nothing but one great mass of snow, with here and there the top of some tall pine showing itself. While thus peering through the darkness and trying to stop the beating of her heart she thought she heard a voice call. Ned snorted and pawed the snow until she had to scold to make him keep quiet.
“Listen, Ned, listen!” She slipped from his back and led him near the tree. Yes, there it was again, more distinct, yet far away and faint.
She shouted: “Padre! Padre! what’s the matter, and where is the mine?”
A voice answered, sounding as if it came from a deep well. Again she shouted, and hallooed at the top of her voice: “Padre! Padre! Are you dead, Padre, and up in the heaven?”
This time the answer seemed to come out of the snow, yet muffled and indistinct as before. She stumbled against some broken timbers, sticking up out of the drift, and then she realized the awful truth. There had been a snow-slide and the men, with her father, were buried beneath it.
The mass of snow on the mountain just above them had loosened, although the weather did not seem warm enough to warrant such a thing, and had come in one great avalanche, crushing everything in its pathway. She hurried on some distance and then shouted again, and this time the voice was directly under her feet.
“Padre, is that you?” she called, placing her mouth near the snow, and then throwing herself flat on the bank, she put her ear down to listen.
“Yes; is that you, Bushy?”
“Yes, yes, I’ll dig you out,” she cried, beginning to dig with all her might; her little hands soon making a large hole in the soft snow beneath her.
“I am not very far under,” called her father, so faint she could scarcely hear, “but I am pinned down with a beam of the tool-house. I don’t think I’m hurt much. Dig with anything you can find until I can make you hear and understand all I say.”
Bushy got a piece of broken plank and worked for fifteen minutes as she never worked before. Ned stood by and neighed every time Bushy spoke to her father.
“Now,” said Mr. Sukolt, when she had dug a deep hole down to him, “try and get me out, so I can help the boys. None of them were up but me when the slide covered us. All depends on you, Bushy.”
“YES, YES, I’LL DIG YOU OUT,” SHE CRIED.
But Bushy was too little to make much headway, and her strength was not half enough to lift the great beam that was right across her father’s body. “This will never do, Bushy. There is nothing left but for you to ride to the blacksmith’s. No, there is a camp of miners down the gulch, only a mile from here. Ride there as fast as Ned can take you; have the miners bring shovels and picks to dig us out; the boys may be smothered even by this time.”
Bushy did not tell her father that she thought the slide had cut off the way there, but she rode Ned as far as she could, then tied him to a tree and started on the half run and half jump to the camp.
Bushy had never been known to say “I can’t.” She carried the lantern, floundered through the snow out to the trail which would lead her to the camp. On, on she went, sometimes missing the path, then she had to go back and, by the aid of the lantern, hunt the blazed trees by which the miners had marked the way on either side of the trail.
For awhile she got along very well. It was all down grade, and she had gone so fast that she was not a bit cold. Soon came a change, for the path led over a kind of hill, and the wind swept down upon her with wicked force. Her little legs grew so tired that it was hard to draw them along. Once she sat down to rest a minute, and had it not been for the awful state the men were in she would have given up and cried. Her hands, with all her swinging back and forth, would not keep warm, and her feet were now so cold they pained her every time she moved them. At last in the distance she saw a faint outline of the camp, for the moon was looking out through the heavy clouds and gave a dim light. Next appeared the glimmer of the camp-fire. Oh, how far away it seemed to Bushy, now crying in earnest! Her feet had grown numb and her eyes so heavy that she thought she would never get there.
She was about to sit down again when she thought she heard her father’s voice close beside her say, in tones of reproach: “All depends on you, Bushy.” She started on again, but how she made the last few yards she never knew.
Next day Mr. Robinson, whose camp she had gone to, told her father all about it.
“You see I was waked up by hearing a kind of thump against the cabin. I thought it was our old dog Spot. It was such a tarnation cold night that I hadn’t the heart to keep him out. I got up to call him, and there lay your Bushy in a heap in the snow at my feet.
SHE THOUGHT SHE HEARD HER FATHER SAY, “ALL DEPENDS ON YOU, BUSHY.”
“I knew something must be awfully wrong. I was skeared out of my wits, and gave a halloo that raised the whole camp. We soon had some brandy down her little throat, which brought her to herself a bit. She said ‘Padre! Great Pine Mine! Snow-slide!’ Great guns! It took the boys just two minutes to be on the way. One of the men rubbed her hands, gave her more brandy, then wrapped her up in a blanket, and with the help of another fellow, carried her back. They found Ned where Bushy had left him tied to a tree, after which it was easy to reach the camp, and your Tom took care of her.”
He brushed his coat-sleeve across his eyes as he said: “She’s a kid in ten million, she is!”
The relief party soon had the mine opened and the men rescued, but had it not been for Bushy’s brave little heart they might all have perished beneath the snow-slide.