Chapter Five.
Fishing for a Boy.
Sam Hardock looked at the boy with a mingling of horror and pity on his countenance.
“What yer talking about?” he cried. “Can’t yer understand as it means trouble? Someone’s deloodering of yer away so as you may be drownded, too.”
But Joe Jollivet hardly heard him in his excitement. He was convinced that he had heard Gwyn calling for aid, and he dashed off in search of his comrade.
He felt that it was useless, but he stepped back to the mouth of the ancient mine, and shouted down it once, but without response, and then started to climb out of the gully in which he stood, mounting laboriously over the rugged granite masses which lay about, tangling and scratching himself among the brambles, and at last standing high up on the slope to gaze round and shout.
“What’s the good o’ that?” cried Hardock, who was following him. “Come back.”
For answer Joe gazed round about him, wondering whether by any possibility there was another opening into the mine hidden by bramble and heath. He had been all over the place with Gwyn scores of times, and the walled-in mouth was familiar enough; and from the cliff edge to the mighty blocks piled up here and there he and Gwyn had climbed and crawled, hunting adders and lizards among the heath, chased rabbits to their holes in the few sandy patches, and foraged for sea-birds’ eggs on the granite ledges and, by the help of a rope, over on the face of the cliffs. But never once had they come upon any opening save the one down into the old mine.
“But there must be—there must be,” muttered Joe, with a feeling of relief, “and I’ve got to find it. It’s blocked up with stones, and the blackberries have grown all over it. There!—All right. Ahoy! Coming.”