“Oh, I say, you are good at this sort of thing,” cried Mark eagerly. “I shouldn’t have thought of that.”
“We couldn’t fight in the dark; we shouldn’t know friends from foes.”
“We should know our own men, and of course your men would be enemies to my men; but, of course, we shouldn’t want to fight, but to know Purlrose and his men. Yes, we must have pitch torches. I can bring any number of them, for we use them sometimes in the big parts of the mine, where the smoke doesn’t matter. Well, it all seems easy enough. I don’t believe there’ll be a door to batter down, only a curtain across to keep the wind out, and it’s a very narrow place, I remember. I went just inside once.”
“I went in fifty yards or more, with Nick Garth,” said Ralph, “and we had candles. We were looking for lead, but it was all stone shells.”
“Oh, there’s no lead there,” said Mark confidently. “We’ve got all the lead worth working at the Black Tor.”
“Yes, I’m afraid so; but there’s a warm spring of water in there, and from where we stopped, you could hear water running and falling, ever so far-off.”
“But what was it like, as far as you went in?”
“Just as if the mountain had been cracked, and both sides of the crack matched, only sometimes they were two feet apart, and sometimes twenty or more, making big chambers.”
“Yes; some of our mine’s like that,” said Mark thoughtfully. “I say, enemy: think they set any sentries?”
“No, I don’t believe they would.”