Several ran to the spot, and at the bottom of an old claim full thirty feet deep they discovered on looking intently down the face of a man rising out of the clayey water. They lowered ropes and hauled him up.
“How did you come there, mate?”
“He had come into the camp in the dark, and, not knowing the ground, and having (to tell the truth) had a drop, he had fallen into the claim.”
He was asked with an air of suspicion how long ago this had happened.
“More than an hour,” replied the wily one.
Crawley looked at him, and being, unlike the others, acquainted with the man's features, saw, spite of the clay-cake he was enveloped in, that his whiskers were frizzled to nothing and his fiendish eyebrows gone. Then a sickening suspicion crept over him; he communicated it by a look to mephistopheles.
Acting on it he asked, with an artful appearance of friendly interest:
“But the men? the poor men that were in the tent?”
“What! the captain and his mate?”
“Yes!”