Twenty minutes’ hard riding brought them to the foothills. Still at the gallop the ponies were urged up a winding rocky trail, and finally a tall black chimney and a group of rough buildings came into view.
“There it is,” said the cowboy, indicating a ledge just above.
As they went forward, still at full speed, Wilson gazed toward the mine entrance with some astonishment. Mine disasters he had always thought of as scenes of great excitement—people running to and fro, wringing their hands, excited crowds held back by ropes, and men calling and shouting. Here, about a spot but little distinguished from the rest of the rocky, sparsely-treed mountain side, was gathered a group of perhaps fifty men, some sitting on beams and rocks, others moving quietly about, all smoking.
On their being discovered, however, there was a stir, and as Muskoka and the boy dismounted at the foot of a rough path and ascended there was a general movement of the miners and cowmen to meet them.
“I got him,” Muskoka announced briefly to a grizzle-haired man who met them at the top. “This is Bartlett, the mine boss,” he said to Wilson by way of introduction. The boss nodded.
“The tapping’s going on yet, is it, Joe?”
“No. It’s stopped, just like Hoover’s did,” was the gloomy response. “And just when we were getting onto it ourselves.”
The speaker held up a small board pencilled with figures and letters. “Redding there hit on the idea that maybe Young was knocking out the numbers of letters in the alphabet, and we made this table, and just found out we had it right when the tapping stopped. That was twenty minutes ago, and we haven’t had another knock since.”
“Let’s see it. What did you get?”
“There—‘20, 7, 5, 20, 21, 16‘—’T G E T U P.’ Something about ‘can’t get up,’ we figured it. But it’s not enough to be of any use.