“To be sure. Yes, I couldn’t quite make it out,” said the Colonel, coolly, as he turned away; but Gwyn noticed that he took out his handkerchief to pass it over his forehead, and then wiped the insides of his hands as if they were damp.
“Let’s go back by the road,” said the Colonel, after shading his eyes and taking a look round; “but I want to pass the mouth of the mine.”
Upon reaching the latter, the Colonel drew a hammer from his pocket, and after routing out a few grey pieces of stone from where they lay beneath the furze bushes, he cracked and chipped several, till one which looked red in the new cleavage, and was studded with little blackish-purple, glistening grains, took his fancy.
“Carry this home for me, Gwyn,” he said. “I wonder whether that piece ever came out of the mine?”
“I think all that large sloping bank covered with bushes and brambles came out of the mine some time, father,” said the boy. “It seems to have been all raised up round about the mouth there.”
“Eh? You think so?”
“Yes, father; and as the pieces thrown out grew higher, they seem to have built up the mouth of the mine with big blocks to keep the stones from rolling in. I noticed that when I was being let down. The ferns have taken root in the joints. Lower down, fifteen or twenty feet, the hole seems to have been cut through the solid rock.”
“Humph! you kept your eyes open, then?”
Crossing the wall where the lane ran along by the side of the Colonel’s property, they turned homeward, and in a few minutes Gwyn caught sight of Joe Jollivet’s cap gliding in and out among the furze bushes, as he made his way in the direction of his own house, apparently not intending to be seen. But a few hundred yards farther along the lane there was some one who evidently did intend to be seen, in the shape of Sam Hardock, who rose from where he was sitting on a grey-lichened block, and touched his hat.
“That’s a nice specimen you’ve got there, Master Pendarve,” he said, eyeing the block the boy carried.