“You have lost a tool, perhaps?” said Christian, who noticed that he was quite stout and heavy, and had nothing of the freedom and ease which is usual with miners accustomed to the use of the bucket.
Scarcely had he spoken, when the unknown, who seemed to have been waiting to hear his voice before coming to some decision, took the seat by his side with more resolution than agility, and waited in silence for the second whistle.
Christian supposed that he did not understand Norwegian, and being familiar by this time with almost all the dialects of the north, he tried to enter into conversation with him; but all his efforts were useless. The man remained perfectly silent, as if fright at seeing himself suspended directly over the abyss had paralyzed his faculties. The bucket, as it is called, employed in mines, is made, as the reader knows, of stout staves, bound with iron, and requires to be steered in its passage up and down the tremendous shaft. Christian, who was already accustomed to this mode of transportation, worked it very skilfully. Standing on the edge, with one arm thrown around a rope, he lightly struck the sides of the shaft with his foot, to prevent the rocking bucket from being broken against them, and, having given up getting anything out of his companion, he began quietly to sing a Venetian barcarolle, when his foot—the only one that happened to be on the edge of the conveyance at the moment—was treacherously pushed with sufficient force to make him lose his balance, and send him swinging off into the void.
Fortunately, Christian, who was habitually no less prudent than bold, had grasped the rope firmly with his left arm, and he slipped down somewhat as a basket would have done by the handle, without loosening his hold. The unknown lifted his sharp-edged hammer with the intention of striking off his right hand, with which Christian had saved himself by seizing the edge of the bucket. He would inevitably have lost one of his hands, and probably his life as well, had it not been for the swinging and sudden dip of the bucket, jerked down by the weight of his body. At the same time his feet, as they hung in the air, struck a second bucket, which had been let down from above, and he was able to give the first one such a push that the assassin was obliged to take to the ropes himself, in order to keep from being thrown out.
This moment was sufficient to enable Christian to cling to the second rope, and jump into the second bucket, which ascended rapidly, while the one in which the assassin remained alone, disappeared from sight with even greater rapidity. Just as Christian reached the top of the shaft, and jumped out on the platform around it, a dull crash ascended from its depths, while, at that very moment, Stangstadius, with his fantastic face all radiant with smiles, came up to him.
“Come, my dear baron,” he cried, “make haste! They will not have supper over yonder in the village until you arrive, and I am dying of inanition.”
“What has happened?” cried Christian to the miners who were working the pulley, without answering Stangstadius; “where is the other bucket? Where is the man?—”
“The rope broke,” replied one of them, with a tremendous oath, and pretending to deplore the accident, while the other whispered in Christian’s ear:
“Not a word! We let him fall!”
“What! you have precipitated this unfortunate—this madman—?”