“Can’t say, sir, but thick enough.”
“But is it just over our heads here?”
“Well, I should say it warn’t, sir; but I can’t quite tell, because it’s so deceiving. I’ve tried over and over to make it out, but one time it sounds loudest along there, another time in one of the other galleries. It’s just as it happens. Sound’s a very curious thing, as I’ve often noticed down a mine, for I’ve listened to the men driving holes in the rock to load for a blast, and it’s quite wonderful how you hear it sometimes in a gallery ever so far off, and how little when you’re close to. Come along. No fear of the water coming in, or I’d soon say let’s get to grass.”
The boys did not feel much relieved, but they would not show their anxiety, and followed the mining captain with the pulsation of their hearts feeling a good deal heavier; and they went on for nearly an hour before they reached the spot familiar to them, one which recalled the difficulty they had had with Grip when he ran up the passage, and stood barking at the end, as if eager to show them that it was a cul-de-sac.
Hardock went right to the end, and spent some time examining the place before speaking.
Then he began to point out the marks made by picks, hammers, and chisels, some of which were so high up that he declared that the miners must have had short ladders or platforms.
“Ladders, I should say,” he muttered; “and the mining must have been stopped for some reason, because the lode aren’t broken off. There’s plenty of ore up there if we wanted it, and maybe we shall some day, but not just yet. There’s enough to be got to make your fathers rich men without going very far from the shaft foot; and all this shows me that it must have been very, very long ago, when people only got out the richest of the stuff, and left those who came after ’em to scrape all the rest. There, I think that will do for to-day.”
The boys thought so, too, though they left this part rather reluctantly, for it was cooler, but the idea of going along through galleries which extended beneath the sea was anything but reassuring.
That evening the Major came over to the cottage with his son, and the long visit of the boys underground during the day formed one of the topics chatted over, the Major seeming quite concerned.
“I had no idea of this,” he said. “Highly dangerous. You had not been told, Pendarve, of course.”