“Let’s see where!” said Geoffrey.
Half an hour’s walking showed that it led onward to a farther point on the sea, and he hesitated as to whether he should go on. A glance at his watch told him that he had ample time, and as there was another ruined engine-house evidently by the track, he walked on, finding that the path led direct to the side of another mining venture, but evidently of much older date, and he quite started as he found how near the path went by a yawning shaft.
It had probably once been protected by a wall of loosely piled-up stones, but these lay scattered here and there, while the great engine-house had half fallen, the chimney only being intact.
“How dangerous,” thought Geoffrey, as he gazed down into the shaft, and noted how the grass and heath had grown over the embankment of débris which ran down in a slope landward, joining a precipitous descent from the engine-house, which stood upon a ridge quite a hundred and fifty feet above the sea, which ran in diamond sparkling cascades over the rocks that fringed the shore nearly a quarter of a mile away.
“They seem to have always perched these places on a ridge,” he mused, as he looked into the ruined engine-house, and laughingly wondered whether there would be any lovers there.
“Quite a wonder!” he exclaimed, as he glanced round the ruin, and, finding nothing to excite his interest, he returned to the well-worn edge of the shaft.
He could not look straight down, for the top had crumbled in, making a sharp slope all round the edge; so, laughing at himself, he picked up one of the great lichen-covered pieces of granite that had formed the protecting wall, hurled it from him, and listened till with a roar came up the sound of a tremendous plash.
“That’s about a hundred and fifty feet down to the water,” he said aloud. “I believe it comes natural to a fellow to want to throw stones down every hole he sees. I’ll be bound to say that Cain and Abel used to do just the same. Adam never was a boy.”
He stood thinking for a few minutes, these old mine shafts attracting him greatly.
“I wonder whether any one was ever thrown down that shaft?” he said aloud. “She would never come out alive.”