And now a strange accident befell him—strange enough in itself, mysterious in its significance, and marvelous as one of God's own miracles in its results. He was going to give himself up to the Deemster at Ballamona, but he did not any longer take the high road through the village, for he shrank from every human face. Almost without consciousness he followed the fenceless cart-track that went by the old lead mine known as the Cross Vein. The disused shaft had never been filled up and never even enclosed by a rail. It had been for years a cause of anxiety, which nothing but its remoteness on the lone waste of the headland had served to modify. And now Dan, who knew every foot of the waste, and was the last man to whom danger from such an occasion might have been feared, plodding along with absent mind in the darkness, fell down the open shaft.
The shaft was forty-five fathoms deep, yet Dan was not so much as hurt. At the bottom were nearly twenty-five fathoms of water, the constant drainage of the old workings, which rose almost to the surface, or dropped to a great depth, according to weather. This had broken his fall. On coming to the surface, one stroke in the first instance of dazed consciousness had landed him on a narrow ledge of rock that raked downward from the seam. But what was his position when he realized it? It seemed to be worse than death itself; it was a living death; it was burial in an open grave.
Hardly had he recovered his senses when he heard something stirring overhead. Were they footsteps, those thuds on the ear, like the first rumble of a distant thunder-cloud? In the agony of fear he tried to call, but his tongue clave to his mouth. Then there was some talking near the mouth of the shaft. It came down to him like words shouted through a black, hollow, upright pillar.
"No use, men," said one speaker, "not a foot farther after the best man alive. It's every man for himself now, and I'll go bail it's after ourselves they'll be going next."
And then another voice, laden with the note of pain, cried, "But they'll take him, Uncle Billy, they'll take him, and him knowin' nothing'."
"Drove it, drove it! Come along, man alive. Lave the lad to this d—d blather—you'd better. Let's make a slant for it. The fac's is agen us."
Dan shuddered at the sound of human voices. Buried, as he was, twenty-five fathoms beneath the surface, the voices came to him like the voice that the wind might make on a tempestuous night, if, as it reaches your ear, it whispered words and fled away.
The men had gone. Who were they? What had happened? Dan asked himself if he had not remembered one of the voices, or both. His mind was stunned and he could not think. He could hardly be sure that in very truth he was conscious of what occurred.
Time passed—he knew not how long or short—and again he heard voices overhead, but they were not the voices that he had heard before.
"I apprehend that they have escaped us. But they were our men nevertheless. I have had advices from Peel that the boat put into the harbor two hours ago."