'He showed you a sample, did he?'
'Yes. And if that lode goes right down to the sixteen level, as he believes, you'd both of you be pretty rich men.'
He laughed. 'Father doesn't realise how much labour and machinery cost these days — that is, when you can get them. He's just on sixty-five, you know, and his brain's getting a little — well, he gets excited and he's not very realistic. It'd mean floating a company. The control would pass out of his hands. And he wouldn't stand for that. By the way, Pryce — he'll try to stop you from doing this job. I don't know just how he'll try, but he will. If he gets too troublesome, let me know. It'll mean a row. But I always get my own way in the end.' He said it with the hint of a chuckle, as though he got some devilish enjoyment out of rowing with his father. I thought of the two hundred and fifty pounds the elder Manack had offered me. And the face at the window watching us go down to the mine.
We were splashing through nearly six inches of water now. Occasionally I felt the outline of the cable through my gum boots.
The gallery was very quiet here. The distant sound of pumping was muffled and distorted so that it was like the steady beat of some giant's heart. Cripples' Ease seemed remote and far away. We were in a world of our own. We were rag worms burrowing under the sea. It ain't natural. That's what Friar had said. I'd never worked under the sea before. To keep my mind off the weight of water above our heads, I began thinking again of Cripples' Ease. The ghostly effect of the house fading away into the mist — that picture of it was indelibly imprinted on my mind. That and the little barred window. It all seemed so unreal. 'Has Cripples' Ease been in your family long?' I put the question to him more for something to say than out of any real curiosity.
'Father moved there in the early twenties,' he replied. 'I don't know much about it — I'd left by then. Some woman he'd taken up with gave it to him. Her father died and left it to her, together with a holding in Wheal Garth. You can see the name over the front door. James Nearne. He was landlord when the place was still a pub.' He caught my arm. 'Here we are,' he said. He bent his head so that his lamp lit the floor of the gallery. It dropped away into a great pit. Beyond the pit the gallery continued for perhaps ten feet and then stopped. In the blank wall at the end was fixed a great galvanised iron block round the wheel of which ran the cable we had been following.
There was water at the bottom of the pit. It lay like a still, black sheet some fifteen feet below us, its surface rippled by falling drops. Scaffolding spanned the hole and was built up into a shaft cut vertically in the roof of the gallery. Ladders climbed the scaffolding and disappeared in the black funnel of the shaft. 'We've cleared about ten feet of that shaft by blasting,' Manack told me. 'I reckon there's about another fifteen feet to go. Didn't dare go on without an expert. After each blow we cleared the rock. In the final blow I'm banking on all the loose rock falling down there.'
He indicated the pit.
'The weight of the water may carry rock into the gallery,' I said. 'I wouldn't like to say what'd happen when the sea breaks in here.'
'I've thought of that,' he said. 'My idea is this. You work up as near to the sea as you can. When you daren't go any farther, you fix your main explosives in watertight cartridges. Then you run a long drill through, put a small charge in and let the sea seep into the Mermaid. When the whole gallery is filled right up, then we blow the main charges by electric detonators. Okay?'