I said, 'Your mother had holdings in Wheal Garth, didn't she?'
The beam of his lamp shone on me. 'How did you know that?' he asked.
'I didn't,' I answered. 'I was just guessing. A man whose sole interest is the acquisition of a mine might be expected to marry into a family that had holdings.'
'Yes,' he said. 'You're quite right. My mother's father was one of the original adventurers. He had quite a big shareholding.'
I hesitated. A question was on the tip of my tongue. But it stuck in my throat. It was too direct. I twisted it round another way. 'I suppose you hold an interest in Wheal Garth — from your mother?'
'No,' he answered. 'She left it all to the old man.' Again that harsh laugh. 'She was hardly likely to leave it to me. At the age of fourteen I ran away from school. Went to South Africa. Worked as a mechanic in a garage, opened up a tractor business, selling and delivering to Rhodesian farms, did a bit of engineering. I was a sad disappointment to them. They both wanted me to become a miner, you see. I don't suppose I'd written to my mother for a year at the time she died. And I was the only child. She died in 1924, just after I'd got to South Africa. I was fifteen then. After six years in South Africa I went to South America, trading in machinery along the western seaboard. Then I went to Mexico, fooling around in oil. I was in Persia, trying to outsmart the Arabs, when war broke out.'
The sea was very loud now. But I scarcely noticed it. I was thinking that if his mother died in 1924, she must have still been alive when my mother went off with Manack senior. The question that had stuck in my throat before came out suddenly 'How did your mother die?' I asked.
He turned and the beam of his lamp glared in my eyes. 'Pneumonia,' he said. Then in that hard, quick voice of his: 'What made you ask that?'
'I just wondered — that's all,' I mumbled.
He went on then. All down the adit we had passed old galleries, leading off on either side, — some of them so narrow that a man could scarcely squeeze his body through, others little more than boles through which a man would have to crawl on hands and knees. But at a bend a wider gallery ran off to the right, and as I shone my lamp into the gaping blackness I caught a glimpse of the top of a ladder poking up through a hole in the floor. The rhythmic thump and suck of a pumping engine sounded above the muffled thunder of the waves in the mouth of the adit. 'That leads down to the Mermaid,' Captain Manack said. There's a pump worked by a water wheel farther along that gallery. It clears the mine to a depth of twenty-three fathoms below sea level. You'll see the water running into the adit later.'