"Quite firm," said Chaytor. Then there came a terrified scream, and the sound of a heavy body falling. Then--silence.
Chaytor, with white face and lips tightly set, still bent over the mouth of the shaft, still looked down the dark depths, still listened. Not a sound--not even a groan.
"It is done," he muttered.
He pulled up the severed rope, and thought that it might have happened without his intervention. He had read of a parallel instance, and of the death of a miner in consequence.
"It was an accident," he said, "as this is. The rope would have given way without my touching it. Such things occur all over the world. Look at the colliery accidents at home--hundreds of men are killed in them, here there is only one."
These thoughts were not prompted by compunction; he simply desired to shift the responsibility from his own shoulders. It was a miserable subterfuge, and did not succeed. In the first flush of his crime its shadow haunted him.
He let the rope fall from his hand down the shaft. "I could not go to him," he said, "if I wanted. How quiet he is!"
A mad impulse seized him.
"Basil Basil!" he cried in his loudest tone; and as no reply reached him, he said, looking around, "Well, then, is it my fault that he does not answer me?"
He paced to and fro, a dozen steps this way, a dozen that, counting his steps. Fifty times at least he did this, always with the intention of going to the tent or the river, and always being drawn back to the mouth of the shaft, over which he hung and lingered. It possessed a horrible fascination for him.