“Binney and I will d-dig two hours,” Mark says. “Then we’ll wake you. You d-dig two hours and wake us. It’s got to be d-d-done before daylight.”
Plunk and Tallow went to bed with their clothes on while Mark and I put out the light and crowded under the floor. There was plenty of room when we got down, but it was dark as a pocket. Mark lighted the lantern.
“No,” says he. “There hain’t no ch-chinks.”
We crawled to the front of the house and began to dig with our wooden shovels. The digging was easy because the house sat on a regular sand-pit. All that country is sand, anyhow. Mark says it was probably the shore of Lake Michigan once, and that the lake kept throwing up sand and throwing up sand until it crowded itself back fifty miles or so. Maybe that is so, but it took a mighty long time to do it.
The worst part of the digging was the way sand kept running back into the hole. We couldn’t stop it, and so we had to dig about four times as much as we would if it had only stayed where it belonged. We never rested, though, and by the end of our two hours we had a good deep hole dug. We’d got below the logs. Plunk and Tallow would have to make the hole larger and begin to tunnel under. It looked to me as if we could finish all right in our second two hours. That would bring us out about three o’clock.
I slept like a log until Tallow waked me up. It didn’t seem as though I’d got my head down on the pillow, and for a minnit I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t care if we never escaped. But Tallow kept on shaking me and yanking me till I was roused, and then it was all right. Mark and I went under the house again, and I want to say that Tallow and Plunk had worked like beavers. They’d done a lot more than I expected they would. Mark was tickled, too.
“Now,” says he, “we got to work f-f-fast.”
We did. The dirt flew. We found out, though, that tunneling in sand isn’t all it might be cracked up to be. The digging is easy, but the roof don’t stay up. I had my head and shoulders through under the logs tunneling away while Mark took my sand and threw it out of the hold. Maybe I went at it too hard, or maybe it would have done what it did, anyhow, but all of a sudden the whole roof gave way and came down onto me kerplunk. It buried my head and arms and shoulders, and I want to stop right here to say that I was the scairtest boy in the state of Michigan. I thought I was a goner. I couldn’t breathe or holler or anything. The sand was so heavy I couldn’t move, and I guess if Mark hadn’t been right there to see what was going on I’d have smothered, sure. He didn’t waste any time, though, but grabbed me by the feet and yanked me out a-kiting. I was full of sand—eyes, mouth, ears—and it was a couple of minnits before I could force myself back to work. But I did, and Mark patted me on the back. That made me feel pretty good, I tell you.