Darkness had swallowed him up along with pain. He was wedged tightly, and it hurt to breathe. Even the tiniest attempt at movement brought on sharp pain as a jagged rock somewhere below him dug further into his unprotected solar plexus. Yet, still his hands clawed fruitlessly into the collapsing earth about him. His legs were a different story. His left was some how bent up awkwardly beneath him, caught upon some rocky, subterranean rim, while his right one dangled less restrictedly, as if still in free fall; not yet making contact with the same type of underground impediment. Even if there were light to aid him, the sifting dirt and dust, it created, were inhibiting his vision while filling his nostrils with their earthy scent and hence causing him to choke weakly as his lungs strived to draw in fresh air. His heart, already frantic in its pace, sped up even further as his brain was at last to acknowledge the gravity of his situation. He was trapped! Imprisoned! Buried alive beneath the earth's surface!
Short moments earlier, while dusk had been gathering across the land, he had been walking back down the steep grade, he had climbed, towards his waiting horse when the rocky outcrop, now above him, suddenly gave way beneath his feet. He had heard it said before that in times of crisis, the world slowed down while your outward focus narrowed in its immediacy, but it had not been so for him. One moment his green eyes were taking in the mellifluous tones of deep pinks and purples as the sun continued its descent towards the horizon, and in the next, these heavenly hues were replaced with darkness, gravel and grit as the ground opened to swallow him up.
It had all happened so quickly that his body had little time to register the torment Mother Earth had inflicted upon him as he was hurtled some ten feet towards her womb. But now as he remained suspended like a broken marionette discarded to a backroom hook, he was held tight within her unforgiving grasp while pain and distress awakened within him. The gloved hands, which had attempted to stop his plummet, were scraped raw about his wrists while bits of aggravating grit had become entrapped beneath their well worn leather. Similar ailments made themselves known in the continuing minutes as their stinging pain spread throughout his body, but it was the torment of his trapped leg beneath him and the flaring agony radiating through his gut that brought about the most misery
From this anguish spread the initial seeds of panic. 'My God, he was trapped beneath the earth with no one else around for miles! How foolish he had been to investigate the site of this contour stripping alone.' But when he had first noted the flagrant disregard for the land brought on by some ruthless miners, who had trespassed onto this corner of the Ponderosa, his anger had gotten the better of him. Now, however, it wasn't the land alone which suffered from their cold yet calculated rape of it. He, too, was victim to their whim.
Trapped, he was held captive, much like the hero in the book Adam had read to him when he was a young boy. He had forgotten its author and many of its more minor details during these moments of torment, but never would it leave his memory how the mysterious man, within its pages, had been thrown into the Bastille, a French prison, while his face was enclosed within an iron mask which he was forced to wear until his death occurred many years later. Musketeers, sword play, and intrigue sprang forth from the pages his elder brother read to him, while the fading firelight of late evenings upon the settee threatened to cut short these revelries. Yet it was the fate of another boy, one from the Bible who bore his name, that finally flitted through his struggling mind as pain fought with reason. He had been cast into a pit by his heartless brothers, spending many hours alone in his despair while awaiting his uncertain destiny. One, who like himself now, cried out to God to please save him from this darkness.