“We’re ready when you are,” said Griggs from the chamber. “The light’s burning quite brightly.”
“Bring it here, then.—I say, Mr Wilton, there isn’t room for all of us on this bit of a landing. Will you go up to the top and be ready to fire?”
“No,” said Wilton shortly. “I’ll leave it to you and Ned.”
He stepped back to join his friends in the chamber, and then, seeing how they were occupied, he stepped out on to the remains of the terrace, to stand there examining the openings in the cliff-face opposite.
“That’s right, Griggs, swing it down gently,” said Chris. “You, Ned, unsling your gun, and the first rattler you see give him a charge of small shot.”
Ned fixed himself against the wall with his left arm round one of the projections, cocked his piece, and stood ready with the muzzle pointed downward, gazing the while into the darkness far below, now beginning to be illumined by the swinging lanthorn, as Griggs paid out the rope and sent it lower and lower.
“You can see the heap of stuff—ashes, lying in a slope now,” cried Chris, who was watching intently. “Look, there’s one of those—you know what—looking almost white and shining.—Isn’t that something moving, Griggs?”
“Can’t see anything yet but that pile of stuff that went down. I say, it’s not so very deep, after all.”
“Thirty feet at least,” said Chris decisively.—“There, I’m sure of that. I saw something move right over in that—”
“Corner,” he was going to say, but the word was smothered by the sharp echoing report of Ned’s piece, whose flash seemed brighter than the light of the lanthorn, which glowed like a dull star now disappearing in a passing cloud of smoke.