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Tracy's hands were tired and sore with blisters and scrapes when she finished her turn at enlarging the small but slowly growing hole in the floor. The hole itself went down maybe four inches now, but the original crack went down even further: presumably all the way down to underlying gravel and sub-soil. How far was that? A quarter inch more? Several inches? There was no way to tell. If she had a long thin object to poke down into the crack maybe she could tell, but she had no such object.
Under the cover of the rolled up shirt that she and Mouse used to conceal their digging activities she shoved her hard-earned chunks of broken-off concrete under the sleeping mat. Then she carefully dropped several tiny damp dough-balls made from their last sandwiches down the crack at the bottom of the hole - something that Mouse had insisted that they do frequently. Some of the tiny dough-balls contained little chunks of ham or cheese.
"We are filling the original crack with bits of concrete that we scrape and break off," Mouse had earlier pointed out. "If we wait too long to try to get food down into the crack it may be too late."
When Tracy was done she rolled away from the shirt-concealed hole to face Mouse.
"Are we through all the concrete yet?" Mouse whispered.
"No," Tracy admitted. "And it's getting much harder to work as we get deeper. I almost dropped your jewel into the crack a couple of times. That's the bad news. The good news is that the original crack is still getting wider as we go down: over half an inch wide now. Our hole itself is over an inch across at the bottom,"
"But the crack must be getting full of the smaller concrete bits we break off and can't catch," Mouse noted.
"Nothing we can do about that. What's the news about our little digging friend?"
"My thoughts of food are still bringing it towards us, but it's getting really weak and hungry," said Mouse. "It hasn't found much to eat under this building. But I sense it to be very near; maybe it's getting very close to our hole. It will soon get to us soon or die trying. If it dies we're screwed, though maybe some other creature will eventually follow the tunnel it dug."
"OK genius," whispered Tracy. "And if it does get to us what then?"
"I don't know, Cousin," said Mouse. "First things first."
"Right," said Tracy. "First things first. First let's first get some sleep. Then we'll work on the hole again in the morning."
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