"There are forty-seven men missing, and the new men can sleep in their cottages."
"That's so," said the Colonel, "but there are the wives and the children. I shall send sleeping tents and eating tents, and provisions enough to feed a battalion. Forty-seven lives," said he, pityingly.
"Ay, sir," said the deputy, "and such lives, some of them; for Mr. Hope and Miss Mary Bartley—leastways that is not her name now, she's Mr. Hope's daughter."
"Why, what has she to do with it?"
"I am sorry to say, sir, she is down the mine."
"God forbid!" said the Colonel; "that noble girl dead, or in mortal danger."
"She is, sir," and, lowering his voice, "by foul play;" then seeing the Colonel greatly shocked and moved, he said, "and I ought not to keep it from you. You are our nearest magistrate; the young lady told me at the pit mouth she is Mr. Hope's daughter."
"And so she is."
"And she said there was a plot to destroy her father in the mine by exploding the old workings he was going to visit. One Ben Burnley was to do it; a blackguard that has a spite against Mr. Hope for discharging him. But there was money behind him and a villain that she described to us—black eyebrows, a face like a corpse, and dressed in a suit of tweed one color. We hoped that she might have been mistaken, or she might have warned Mr. Hope in time; but now it is to be seen that there was no mistake, and she had not time to warn him. The deed is done; and a darker deed was never done, even in the dark."
Colonel Clifford groaned: after a while he said, "Seize that Ben Burnley at once, or he will soon leave this place behind him."