CHAPTER VI—IN THE OLD TUNNEL
The lame Indian youth had no idea of giving up the leadership of the expedition. He grunted, and pushed Chet’s hand away when the white boy reached to take the rudely-made lantern by its bail.
“Me go first,” he said with confidence, and immediately swung himself over the edge of the rock.
In spite of his crippled leg, John Peep went down the rough rocks quickly, clinging with one hand to the knotted rope, the bail of the lantern swung over his other arm.
“He must have been often down this shaft,” thought Chet to himself; but said nothing to Dig Fordham. He only wondered why the Indian had often descended this shaft into the heart of the mountain.
John Peep raised his face and spoke from the depths:
“Havens follow—’bout ten yards; then other white boy come ten yards further back. Rope plenty strong.”
“All right!” responded Chet cheerily. “We’re after you.”
“Whew!” whistled Digby. “If that rope should break we’d be after him with a vengeance!”
The descent of the shaft was no easy matter, as the two chums from Silver Run quickly learned. Three bearing their weight upon it made the rope jerk and wriggle like an excited snake. Both Chet and Dig were several times almost thrown from their footing on the rough rock.
“You’re rocking the boat, Chet; look out!” grumbled Dig. “I expect to make a dive over your head any moment. Ugh! that’s wriggly!”
“Hang on, old man!” called back Chet. “That’s the best I can tell you.”
The walls of the shaft, however, did make a natural stairway; and at a pinch one might have climbed down and up again without recourse to the knotted rope. However, the rope enabled the boys to swing from side to side of the shaft, as the footing seemed better.
John Peep’s lantern cast sufficient light upward for the chums to see where they stepped. Indeed, all the light from the candle flickered on the walls above the descending Indian; the bottom of the pit was in utter darkness.
It was a slow descent, as was natural, and the shaft was very deep. As they had climbed so much higher than the plateau where the Crayton shaft was sunk, naturally this pit must be much deeper if it reached the old tunnel in which the Crayton gold vein had petered out in the old gold-mining days.
It was gruesome, too. Even Dig Fordham seemed to have lost his voice at the top of the shaft. An occasional grunt from John Peep was all the vocal sound that was made by the three for some time.
The white boys’ leather-shod feet scraping the rocks was the principal sound, for the Indian’s tread in his moccasins was silent.
This continued until finally Dig could restrain himself no longer.
“By the last hoptoad that was chased out of Ireland! How long’s this going to keep up? Is that Indian going to keep climbing down this hole forever?”
“Hush, Dig!” commanded Chet.
“I did not make the place,” said John Peep, with scorn. “White boy scared—he’d better have stayed out. Havens come. He not scared.”
“I’m not scared!” yelled Dig, his voice booming in the shaft. “By the last hoptoad—”
“And that’s silly,” interrupted John Peep quickly. “There is a legend to the effect that St. Patrick drove all the reptilian species out of Ireland; but it is doubtful if the eviction included the so-called common, or garden, toad.”
“Whew!” gasped Dig. “Did you hear that, Chet?”
His chum was chuckling and did not answer. Dig tried to treat John Peep as though he were an uneducated “blanket Indian,” as the uncultivated redmen were called. But John Peep had been some years at school and was notably the brightest scholar in his class.
Why he had taken to the woods and preferred to live in the wilderness, now that vacation had begun, Chet could only surmise.
It was just then that the Indian reached the bottom of the shaft. Or, rather, he reached the place where a hole was broken through the wall into the tunnel from the Crayton shaft.
Here a circular cavern had been hollowed out in past ages by the falling water; the subterranean stream finding an outlet at one side, where another pit dropped away into the heart of the mountain to an unknown depth.
The circular cavern was a most beautiful place, crystal stalactites hanging from its arched roof, while pointed stalagmites were strewn over the floor.
It had been, however, many, many years since there had been a particle of moisture in this cavern. There was a good current of air, and it was dry.
All this the white boys discovered when they reached the end of the rope and stood beside the Indian, Chet turned almost immediately to the cavity into the mining tunnel. It had been recently dug, without a doubt, for there were bright scales of quartz rock lying about and a pile of freshly excavated earth.
“Whew!” muttered Dig in Chet’s ear. “I’d really like to know who did this, wouldn’t you?”
“It wasn’t my father, I’ll be bound,” responded Chet, in the same tone. “There must be somebody interested in the old Crayton diggings besides him. Hush!”
John Peep came back to them. He brought a pick and shovel from some hiding place in the darker end of the cavern. To all appearances they were new implements.
“White boys want to dig into other mine,” he said briefly. “You come. I show.”
“Heap good,” grunted Dig, with a grin.
But the Indian paid him no attention, merely handing him the shovel, while he gave the pickaxe to Chet. Then he stooped to crawl into the newly-excavated passage.
Dig looked at Chet and scratched his head.
“What gets my goat,” he muttered, “is how that redskin talks one minute like a college professor and the next like Poor Lo with his face painted and a dirty blanket trailing at his heels. What do you think of him, anyway?”
“I think he has saved the lives of father and the men with him,” replied Chet earnestly. “Come on, Dig! We’re going to get them out.”
Only a thin shell of earth and rock separated the bottom of the shaft down which the trio had come from the old mining tunnel. Whoever had burst the wall through must have known just where the tunnel lay and must have been aware of its nearness to the ancient watercourse.
The loose earth was dropping in this short passage; but the drift from the Crayton shaft was well timbered with hewn oak. A single wide plank had been knocked out of the shoring to make an entrance into the tunnel.
Down here in the heart of the mountain the planking had neither rotted nor become dry and punky. The timbers all seemed just as good as when the miners had put them in.
“Come on, Dig!” repeated Chet, hurrying along the tunnel. “We can’t get them out any too quickly.”
“Where are you going to dig?” queried his chum.
“Right at the end, of course. Father said he thought the Number Two tunnel of the Silent Sue passed by the end of this drift.”
John Peep said nothing, but held the lantern and let Chet and Dig take the lead. They came to the end of the old passage after walking some distance. Here some recent excavating had undoubtedly been done. There was no rubbish in the way and they could attack at once the end wall.
The roof of the tunnel was a great slab of rock. The old method of “timbering in square sets” had been used in the Crayton claim, and the square cribs, filled with waste rock, upheld the roof of these workings.
What puzzled Chet was the identity of the person who had been so recently working at the end of this abandoned tunnel.
“What was he working here for?” demanded Dig. “There’s no sign of silver that I can see.”
Both boys thought that they knew a good deal about pay ore, both gold and silver. They were so much about their fathers’ mine, and had heard so much miners’ talk, and had seen so many specimens of ore, that they felt they were not to be easily fooled.
John Peep had nothing to say and the expression on his face did not invite questions.
Chet and Digby threw off their coats and set to work. Chet first swung the pick, while Dig shovelled the earth away. In five minutes Chet’s pick rang on a rock in the wall.
“Hello!” exclaimed his chum. “Did you hear that?”
“I hit a rock.”
“And somebody hallooed,” declared his chum, with confidence.
“Was it a voice? Do you think so?” cried the excited Chet. “So soon?”
“I bet you!” was the answer.
Chet attacked the wall with renewed courage. The earth and small stones rattled down faster than Dig could shovel the rubbish aside.
“Hold on! hold on!” gasped Dig. “Let’s take a breath. You’ll bury us both in this stuff, Chet. Wait till I shout again.”
“Go ahead!” panted his chum, quite breathless.
Digby raised his voice as loudly as possible. Immediately there was an answer—unmistakably a human voice!
“They’re in there—and they are alive!” cried Chet, half sobbing. “Come on, Dig! maybe some of them are hurt! I want to hear my father’s voice!”