“Oh, he’s still hanging around out there, living in one of the partly finished rooms and pecking away with pick and shovel trying to get a few more dollars out of the mine,” explained Ned. “Maybe we’ll see him. He’s got a long white beard streaked with green stains from copper ore he’s always handling. Copper Coleson, they call him.”
“I hear he’s got a fellow named Latrobe working for him,” remarked Beals. “I never saw him, but they say he’s an ugly guy.”
“Ugly is right,” declared Rogers. “Since Latrobe’s been out there, nobody’s allowed to go down into the mine, but I guess he won’t object if we take a swim off the beach.”
Eight miles from town the car turned sharply from the main highway to follow a narrow road which wound through a desolate stretch of scrubby woodland for some three miles and emerged upon the shore of Lake Erie. Here on a slight elevation dotted with thickets of scrub oak and birch stood the unfinished mansion known locally as Copper Coleson’s Folly.
“It surely started out to be a grand place,” exclaimed Dick, as he gazed up at the tall brick front with its rows of windows, in none of which glass had ever been placed.
“We’ll leave the car out here in the road,” decided Wilbur. “We can walk around the house and get down to the beach without bothering anybody.”
Beyond the house the land sloped to the water’s edge, ending in a sandy shore which afforded fine bathing, and here the boys disported themselves for an hour, swimming and diving in the cool water.
“I’d like to get a look at this copper mine,” remarked Dick. “I never saw a mine or anything like one—except an old limestone quarry, and that was only a big hole in the ground.”
“There isn’t a whole lot to see in this mine,” replied Ned; “just a vertical shaft about fifteen feet deep, which is nothing more than the old well Coleson was digging when he struck the copper ore. It’s right behind the house. We can go up there and look down it, if you want to, but it’s hardly worth the trouble.”
Getting into their clothes the boys followed a footpath up the slope and crossed a sandy stretch to the rear of the house. Nobody appeared to oppose their progress, and in a moment they were grouped about the mouth of the shaft staring down into the blackness below.