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Cutting the Pipe. Nearly 48 hours after Kathy's fall, the lateral tunnel reached the well pipe. But rescue was hours away. Drill after drill broke. Doggedly, the workmen tried a pneumatic saw. Over the loudspeaker, the screech of their drilling sawed like a file on taut nerves. Finally at 6 o'clock Sunday night they asked that the microphones be turned off. There was a paralyzed wait that dragged on to two hours.
Then, in the glare of the television lights, a doctor stepped into the bucket and was lowered into the shaft. A few minutes later, the announcement came at last over the loudspeaker: "Kathy is dead and apparently has been dead since she was last heard speaking." Kathy's body had been found just below the tunneled opening. Her knees were wedged against her chest. Kathy had fallen into a coma, and then died because her cramped body could not get enough oxygen. There was no pain in her face.
The doctor asked the crowd to leave. As the last figures disappeared, Bill Yancey was hauled slowly up the shaft. In his arms was a small, blanketed form. Tenderly he laid the bundle on a white pillow in the back of a black car. In silence, the car rolled slowly past the derricks and the piled dirt, past the gaping hole and the steel casing, past the rows of exhausted, grimy workmen.