Then came a more severe trial for their patience. Rees and his companion had scarcely got down to the inner court of the castle when they saw in the distance a small party of young tradesmen of the town and their lasses, who were being escorted over the ruins by one of Mrs. Crow’s sons. The two young men, knowing every corner of the old building, easily found a hiding-place for Sep and for a mysterious parcel which Rees had brought, hidden under his rug. This rug he now quickly spread on the remains of one of the wide inner walls, and throwing himself upon it, he lit a cigarette and opened before him a book, on which he appeared to be intent as the excursion party came up. He had to look up then, however, for he and his family were so popular that more than one of the intruders stopped to make kind and respectful inquiries after his mother, which Rees, though boiling with impatience to get rid of them, was obliged to answer civilly. This incident caused a delay of nearly an hour before the two young men could begin their work.
At last, however, the wicket-gate swung to behind the party. Sep instantly, on a whistle from Rees, came out of his hiding-place, and they descended together to the vaulted room. Here Rees, going down on his knees on the floor, opened his mysterious parcel and spread out before Sep’s inquiring eyes a great coil of old garden hose, neatly repaired in various places, and furnished at one end with a sort of macintosh bag.
“What’s that for?” asked Sep.
“To breathe through,” answered Rees in a tone of triumph. “It was the foul air that put out the light and overcame you and me. To go down there safely one must have air from above, like a diver. I’ve stopped up all the holes in the tubing myself, and I’ve joined our own garden hose with Mr. Long’s, which I borrowed out of his tool-shed without troubling him for permission; and I’ve contrived, as you see, a sort of loose air-tight mask at one end to cover the nostrils as well as the mouth. Provided with this, I believe I can breathe down there as freely as up here. Anyhow, I mean to try.”
Sep, though not inclined to put much faith in this ingenious arrangement, and, in fact, most dismally minded concerning their chances of escaping with their lives out of the adventure, listened submissively to all his friend’s instructions, and agreed at last, with much reluctance, to be the one left at the top, while Rees was to test his own apparatus.
Rees then showed his friend an old miner’s lantern which he had bought secondhand in Cardiff years ago when he was a boy. A very long rope completed his equipment. One end of this rope he tied round his waist, fastening the other securely to the bars of the iron grating; then attaching the air-tight mask over his face, with the tube depending from it, he took the lantern in his hand and began the descent.
Sep’s office was to keep the tubing straight, that the supply of air might be unimpeded; also to watch the rope, and, when he saw it jerked three times, to help his friend’s return to the upper air by hauling it up with all his might.
Although he had made light of the risks he was about to run in order to encourage his friend, Rees was really quite as fully aware of the desperate nature of his enterprise as Sep was. All definite hopes about the supposed treasure had, indeed, given place in his mind to the mere desire to carry on to the end an exciting adventure; for Rees, though deficient in moral strength, had just the needful dash and daring for a dangerous feat of this kind. He thought he saw in the discovery of these underground steps, not the confirmation of Goodhare’s ambitious hopes, but the foundation for them. It was, therefore, as an explorer rather than as a robber that he made this third descent.
The first flight of steps was quickly passed. The next stage was the flight of rugged, perpendicular notches with the handrail at the side. To his great joy, the tubing answered admirably. He got to the bottom of this flight of steps, and landed on the spot where he had picked up Sep’s insensible body, without having suffered the slightest inconvenience. Neither did his light go out, although he fancied that it began to burn rather dimly. Down there, in the depths of the earth though, surely his imagination was beginning to play some odd tricks with him. The ground, which was still hard and rocky, sloped down from the bottom of the steps towards what looked like the black round mouth of a cavern. It seemed to Rees that a thin mist, rising like curls of filmy smoke, came out of the blackness of this opening continually, and mounting slowly to just above his head, obscured his view of the walls. Was there some intoxicating property in this vapor, that, in spite of his precautions, perhaps began to cloud his brain? For, as he looked at the walls, he saw again the effect which had dazzled him before; on every side the rock shone like gold in the light of the lantern. He hastened to examine the walls, and found that this singular effect was merely produced by a sort of glaze which, as he could not doubt, the gases generated at this cavernous depth below the earth’s surface had, in the course of ages, deposited there. This, he thought, as, much excited by the strange sight, his eyes ran round the steep, glistening walls, might be another and very reasonable origin of the hidden gold story. Indeed, on this point he was now satisfied, and for a moment he hesitated whether, as he began to find it much more of an effort to draw breath, he should not make his way back to the upper air, and, if not relinquish further search, at least put it off for the present. One look into that cavern a few yards off, though, he must cast.
His lantern, meanwhile, was certainly growing very dim. He had done everything so rapidly that only a few seconds had elapsed since he had began the descent. He now ran down the slope, but stopped short just in time, with a guttural ejaculation of horror.