Half-way up the range, which was veined with quartz, a shaft had been sunk and abandoned. The miners who had done the work had followed a gold-bearing spur some fifty feet down, in the hope of coming upon a golden reef. But the spur grew thinner and thinner, the traces of gold disappeared, and they lost heart. Disappointed in their expectations, and out of patience with their profitless labour, they shouldered their windlass and started off to fresh pastures. Thus the mouth of the shaft was left open and unprotected, and into it Basil dropped, and felt himself slipping down with perilous celerity.
It was fortunate that the shaft was not exactly perpendicular, After following the spur down for twenty feet the miners had found that it took an eccentric turn which necessitated the running in of an adit. This passage was about two yards long, when the spur dipped again, and the shaft was continued sheer into the bowels of the earth. It was this adit which saved Basil's life. When he had slipped down the twenty feet he felt bottom, and there he lay, bruised, but not dangerously hurt.
He cried out for help at the top of his voice, and his cries were presently answered.
"Below there!" cried Chaytor, lying flat on the ground above, with his ear at the mouth of the shaft.
"Is that you, Mr. Chaytor?" cried Basil.
Chaytor (aside): "He remembers my name." (Aloud): "Yes, what's left of me. Where are you?" (Which, to say the least of it, was an unnecessary question.)
Basil: "Down here."
Chaytor (blind to logical fact): "Alive?"
Basil (perceiving nothing strange in the question, and therefore almost as blind): "Yes, thank God!"
Chaytor: "Any bones broke?"