“If that cave-in’s where I think it is,” the sheriff said, “she’s a goner. There’s a stretch in there that’s just silt. Finest slitheriest stuff you ever felt. Comes like a flood of water. Drowns a feller in dirt.” His lips tightened. “First dead man I ever saw I dragged out of a silt-down in here. I was sixteen, I guess-skinniest feller in the batch, so they sent me in after they located the body and shored up a makeshift drift. Dragged him out feet first. Stubborn feller-sucked out of that silt like outa mud. Drownded in dirt. We’ll sweat getting this body out, too.
“Well,” he hitched up his Levi’s, “might as well git on back to town and git a crew out here.”
“She’s not dead,” Low said. “She’s still breathing. She’s caught under something and can’t get loose.”
The sheriff looked at him through narrowed eyes. “I’ve heard you’re kinda tetched,” he said. “Sounds to me like you’re having a spell yourself, talking like that.
“Wanta go back to town, ma’am?” His voice gentled. “Nothing you can do around here any more. She’s a goner.”
“No, she isn’t,” I said. “She’s still alive. I can hear her.”
“Gaw-dang!” the sheriff muttered. “Two of them. Well, all right then. You two are deppytized to watch the mine so it don’t run away while I’m gone.” Grinning sourly at his own wit, he left, taking the deputy with him.
We listened to the echoes of the engine until they died away in the quiet quiet upsurging of the forested hills all around us. We heard the small wind in the brush and the far cry of some flying bird. We heard the pounding of our own pulses and the frightened bewilderedness that was Lucine. And we heard the pain that began to beat its brassy hammers through her body, and the sharp piercing stab of sheer agony screaming up to the bright twanging climax that snapped down into unconsciousness. And then both of us were groping in the darkness of the tunnel. I stumbled and fell and felt a heavy flowing something spread across my lap, weighting me down. Low was floundering ahead of me. “Go back,” he warned. “Go back or we’ll both be caught!”
“No!” I cried, trying to scramble forward. “I can’t leave you!”
“Go back,” he said. “I’ll find her and hold her until the men come. You’ve got to help me hold the silt back.”
“I can’t,” I whimpered. “I don’t know how!” I scooped at the heaviness in my lap.
“Yes, you do,” he said down under. “Just look and see.”
I scrambled back the interminable distance I hadn’t even been conscious of when going in, and crouched just outside the mine entrance, my dirty hands pressed to my wet face. I looked deep, deep inside me, down into a depth that suddenly became a height. I lifted me, mind and soul, up, up, until I found a new Persuasion, a new ability, and slowly, slowly, stemmed the creeping dry tide inside the mine-slowly began to part the black flood that had overswept Lucine so that only the arch of her arm kept her mouth and nose free of the invading silt.
Low burrowed his way into the mass, straining to reach Lucine before all the air was gone.
We were together, working such a work that we weren’t two people any more. We were one, but that one was a multitude, all bound together in this tremendous outpouring of effort. Since we were each other, we had no need for words as we worked in toward Lucine. We found a bent knee, a tattered hem, a twisted ankle-and the splintery edge of timber that pinned her down. I held the silt back while Low burrowed to find her head. Carefully we cleared a larger space for her face. Carefully we worked to free her body. Low finally held her limp shoulders in his arms-and was gone! Gone completely, between one breath and another.
“Low!” I screamed, scrambling to my feet at the tunnel’s mouth, but the sound of my cry was drowned in the smashing crash that shook the ground. I watched horrified as the hillside dimpled and subsided and sank into silence after a handful of pebbles, almost hidden in a puff of dust, rattled to rest at my feet.
I screamed again and the sky spun in a dizzy spiral rimmed with sharp pine tops, and suddenly unaccountably Severeid Swanson was there joining the treetops and the sky and spinning with them as he said, “Teesher! Teesher!”
The world steadied as though a hand had been put upon it. I scrambled to my feet.
“Severeid!” I cried. “They’re in there! Help me get them out! Help me!”
“Teesher,” Severeid shrugged helplessly, “no comprendo. I bring a flying one. I go get him. You say you gotta find. I find him. What you do out here with tears?”
Before I was conscious of another person standing beside Severeid I felt another person in my mind. Before I could bring my gasping into articulation the words were taken from me. Before I could move I heard the rending of rocks, and turning I sank to my knees and watched, in terrified wonder, the whole of the hillside lift itself and arch away like a furrow of turned earth before a plowshare. I saw silt rise like a yellow-red fountain above the furrow. I saw Low and Lucine rise with the silt. I saw the hillside flow back upon itself. I saw Low and Lucine lowered to the ground before me and saw all the light fading as I fell forward, my fingertips grazing the curve of Low’s cheek just before I drank deeply of blackness.
The sun was all. Through the thin blanket I could feel the cushioning of the fine sand under my cheek. I could hear the cold blowing overhead through the sighing trees, but where we were the warmth of the late-fall sun was gathered between granite palms and poured down into our tiny pocket against the mountain. Without moving I could reach Low and Valancy and Jemmy. Without opening my eyes I could see them around me, strengthening me. The moment grew too dear to hold. I rolled over and sat up.
“Tell me again,” I said. “How did Severeid ever find you the second time?”
I didn’t mind the indulgent smile Valancy and Jemmy exchanged. I didn’t mind feeling like a child-if they were the measure of adults.
“The first time he ever saw us,” Jemmy said, “was when he those to sleep off his vino around a boulder from where we chose to picnic. He was so drunk, or so childlike, or both, that he wasn’t amazed or outraged by our lifting and tumbling all over the sky. He was intrigued and delighted. He thought he had died and by-passed purgatory, and we had to restrain him to keep him from taking off after us. Of course, before we let him go we blocked his memory of us so he couldn’t talk of us to anyone except others of the People.” He smiled at me.
“That’s why we got real shook when we found that he’d told you and that you’re not of the People. At least not of the Home. You’re the third blow to our provincialism. Peter and Bethie were the first, but at least they were half of the People, but you-” he waggled his head mournfully, “you just didn’t track.”
“Yes,” I shivered, remembering the long years I hadn’t tracked with anyone. “I just didn’t track-” And I relaxed under the triple reassurance that flooded in from Low and Jemmy and his wife Valancy.
“Well, when you told Severeid yon wanted to find us he stumbled as straight as a wino string back to our old picnic grounds. He must have huddled over that tiny fire of his for several days before we found him-parched with thirst and far past his last memory of food.” Jemmy drew a long breath.
“Well, when we found out that Severeid knew of what we thought were two more of us-we’ve been in-gathering ever since the ships first arrived-well! We slept him all the way back. He would have been most unhappy with the speed and altitude of that return trip, especially without a car or plane.
“I caught your struggle to save Lucine when we were still miles away, and, praise the Power, I got there in time.”
“Yes,” I breathed; taking warmth from Low’s hand to thaw my memory of that moment.
“That’s the quickest I ever platted anything,” Jemmy said.