“All right!” responded Chet cheerily. “We’re after you.”
“Whew!” whistled Digby. “If that rope should break we’d be after him with a vengeance!”
The descent of the shaft was no easy matter, as the two chums from Silver Run quickly learned. Three bearing their weight upon it made the rope jerk and wriggle like an excited snake. Both Chet and Dig were several times almost thrown from their footing on the rough rock.
“You’re rocking the boat, Chet; look out!” grumbled Dig. “I expect to make a dive over your head any moment. Ugh! that’s wriggly!”
“Hang on, old man!” called back Chet. “That’s the best I can tell you.”
The walls of the shaft, however, did make a natural stairway; and at a pinch one might have climbed down and up again without recourse to the knotted rope. However, the rope enabled the boys to swing from side to side of the shaft, as the footing seemed better.
John Peep’s lantern cast sufficient light upward for the chums to see where they stepped. Indeed, all the light from the candle flickered on the walls above the descending Indian; the bottom of the pit was in utter darkness.
It was a slow descent, as was natural, and the shaft was very deep. As they had climbed so much higher than the plateau where the Crayton shaft was sunk, naturally this pit must be much deeper if it reached the old tunnel in which the Crayton gold vein had petered out in the old gold-mining days.
It was gruesome, too. Even Dig Fordham seemed to have lost his voice at the top of the shaft. An occasional grunt from John Peep was all the vocal sound that was made by the three for some time.
The white boys’ leather-shod feet scraping the rocks was the principal sound, for the Indian’s tread in his moccasins was silent.