"Be careful, now!" she warned them again, and ducked her head as she entered the tunnel, which was scarcely more than five feet high. They stooped and followed down the slope of it for about thirty yards, and halted behind her as she waved the lantern over what appeared at first to be a terrific chasm, opening at her feet.
"Eli, ahoy! Ahoy, there!" she called.
"Ahoy!" the voice came up from the depths. "Ahoy, there, Vashti!"
"I have brought the Commandant, with a friend—and the tackle. Shall I fix it here?"
"That's no work for you, my dear," called up Eli. "Let them come down if they've heads for it, and afterwards I can climb up and fix it. Or, stay! Let the one come down, and the other bide aloft, to help me."
"Do you dare?" Vashti asked the Commandant, pointing down to the pit, and then with a wave of her lantern indicating the stairway by which he must descend. It was a ladder of rope, suspended from an iron bar driven into the solid rock about a foot above the floor-level on which they stood. It dangled down into darkness, and the Commandant perceived to his horror that its iron rungs lay close against the cliff.
"Surely you are never going down that way?" he asked.
But Vashti was already stooping to slip off her shoes.
"You need not follow unless you choose."
"Where you go, I go. Let me lead the way."