Dummy stopped short, and turned to stare open-mouthed at his young chief.
“What a head you’ve got, Master Mark,” he said. “I never thought of that.”
“Didn’t you? Well, you see now: we don’t want to find another way in.”
“Yes, we do, if there is one, Master Mark, and stop it up.”
Very little more was said as they went back, Mark becoming thoughtful, and too tired to care about speaking. But that night he lay in bed awake for some time, thinking about the visit to the cavernous mine, and how it honeycombed the mountainous place: then about Dummy’s witches, and the fire and caldron, at the mouth of the hole by Ergles, a mighty limestone ridge about three miles away. Then after a laugh at the easy way in which the superstitious country people were alarmed, he fell asleep, to begin a troublous dream, which was mixed up in a strangely confused way with the great chasm in the mine, down which he had worked his way to get at the ravens’ nest: and then he started into wakefulness, as he was falling down and down, hundreds upon hundreds of feet, to find his face wet with perspiration, and that he had been lying upon his back.
Chapter Ten.
In a Wasp’s Nest.
Days had passed, and strange reports were flying about the sparsely inhabited neighbourhood. Fresh people had seen the witches in their long gowns, and it was rumoured that if any one dared to make the venture, they might be found crouching over their fire any dark, stormy night on the slope of Ergles, where nobody ever went, for it was a desolate waste, where a goat might have starved.