* * * *
Young Carrington, bursting in upon his father and Trevanion, told it all in a breath.
Trevanion rose with the last word.
“The sooner I’m there the better,” he said, phlegmatically.
“It’s queer business,” said John Carrington, frowning. “Keep your eyes open. What do you think of it?”
“I’ll tell you when I come up,” said Trevanion. “If I don’t come up, you’ll look after my boy?”
John Carrington nodded.
“Keep close to young Hastings,” he said, tersely. “Don’t let Richards get behind you alone. I’m inclined to think, though, that the whole thing will be a farce. He’ll take you into a few levels where there couldn’t be any question, and that will be all. Wade and his nephew won’t know. And that will be all there is to it.”
“I’ll drive you over,” said Ned. His eyes were bright with excitement.
Trevanion grinned as he settled himself in the trap.
“I’m going to get my swell ride before I go down,” he said. “Mostly they take ’em when they come up – in a box.”
The others were waiting, garbed in oilskins, candles in their caps – precautionary measures which inclined Mr. Wade to feel that there was something wrong in the management of a mine that was neither lighted nor heated.
Hastings was struggling not to chafe under his rôle of masterly inactivity; he comforted himself with the thought that it was causing things to move in the right direction, at any rate.
Richards’ expression was sardonic. As Carrington had surmised, he proposed to tire out the greenhorns by an exhaustive progress through workings which would be of no possible interest to Trevanion.
He calculated shrewdly about how long it would take before they would be glad to come up. If Trevanion remained behind them, or if he went down without them later – Richards shrugged his shoulders. It was easy for a man to fall down an uncovered winze in a strange mine. And the fall would explain any bruises.
As they started for the cage, he turned to young Carrington. His smile was distinctly disagreeable.
“Sorry you don’t feel like coming, too,” he said, “but you might catch cold or get your clothes dirty.”
Whatever faults there were to young Carrington’s credit, cowardice was not one of them. Not that foolhardiness is not almost as reprehensible.
“If you’ll lend me a cap and a pair of boots, I shall be delighted,” he answered instantly.
“No, Mr. Ned. You’re not in this,” Trevanion remonstrated.
Young Carrington was pulling on his cap composedly now.
“You’ve never been down the Star, even. You won’t be of any use,” Trevanion insisted. Young Carrington was getting into an oilskin coat. Richards had not thought he would.
“I’ll telephone your father,” Trevanion declared.
“Then I’ll go down without you while you’re doing it,” young Carrington declared, willfully.
Trevanion followed him into the cage without more ado. But he didn’t like it.
As the cage dropped into the blackness of the shaft, Richards thought with malicious pleasure that he would outwit them all. Trevanion, holding it everyday work for himself, was uneasy over the boy; Hastings was impatient at his own ignorance – he hated to feel so out of his sphere; Mr. Wade, reviewing each successive stage of the proceedings which had placed him in his present situation, called himself what he would have slain any fellow man for thinking, a silly old fool; and Carrington – ah, a curious tangle of thoughts was young Carrington’s brain, with a curious after-vision of a bright blue sky.
Up in the big house on the hill, John Carrington was wondering if it was not time for Ned to come home.
It is a curious experience – this going underground for the first time.
The chill and the dampness, the change in the air pressure, and the darkness – that vague, depressing darkness, on which the candle in your cap makes so vague and flickering an impression that it seems nervous and palpitant at its own temerity in attempting so gigantic a task.
Above all, and above you, as you clearly realize, for an eighth of a mile, perhaps, the huge impending weight of earth and rock, against whose menace timbering a foot and a half thick seems like trying to bolster the basement of a tottering St. Paul’s with matches.
It is like finding oneself in some gigantic letter press, the screw of which the hand of fate may choose to turn – perhaps now; pressing downward with pitiless, relentless, inanimate mechanism until the Parchment of the World bears the dull red mark of these unwilling witnesses to its deed.
These are all terrors unconfessed. Farthest of real menaces you find – whose vague terror is made dormant by the real necessities of the moment, the constant strain of the eye to distinguish – now to avoid the direct peril of an uncovered winze underfoot, now to notice how closely the “lagging” roofs in the drift, this indefinitely long hole, seven and a half feet square, in which you find yourself.
Then comes the strain of the novice brain to comprehend the reasons and the logic of it all.
Richards showed his native shrewdness in the way he managed the expedition. The humor of its personnel was quite within his comprehension. Three men, ignorant of every detail of mining, Trevanion of the Star, and himself.
It was grotesque enough for comedy.
And, too, Richards had at last taken Mr. Wade’s measure – or thought he had.
“You have to sling softsoap to suit the pig-headed old sissy,” he phrased it.
And he assumed a bluff heartiness which actually became genuine at times, as he explained carefully and clearly the A B C’s of things.
For Richards loved the mine he had made, loved it after the fashion of his nature, with an intensity of possession.
Fought for it fairly when fairness served best, and trickily when trickiness seemed more profitable. Took a man’s genuine pride when he had forced it to obey him. Abused its future for the present good if he felt like it. Slaved for it fiercely in reprisal. It was the only way Richards knew how to love anything.
That these two men whom the accident of fortune had placed in actual ownership of the mine should interfere with him had roused first his rage, and now his determination to placate them, to hoodwink them. He showed a good-natured tolerance of their ignorance, and an indefatigable patience in explanation.
“That’s it; now you’re catching on fine,” he encouraged them, as they grasped some elemental principle of mining. He led them over a good deal of ground during these explanations. He piloted them with a rough carefulness which even included young Carrington. The boy’s being there at all amused him rather than otherwise. But Trevanion was guarding young Carrington with as wary an eye as he was watching Richards.
Mr. Wade decided that for the first time Richards was appearing to advantage.
Aboveground his crudities of manner might be repellent; here he was in his native element, shrewd, practical and zealous.
Mr. Wade began to feel that Trevanion the Taciturn was quite as likely to prove the villain of the piece.
To be sure, it appeared that they had embarked on a tremendous undertaking. Mr. Wade felt that the mine was larger than he had supposed, but, as Richards said, they might as well understand it thoroughly. On this Mr. Wade, with legs that threatened to drop from his hip sockets, plodded on.
Young Carrington turned white more than once, but shut his teeth and went on defiantly; and Hastings owned to himself that he was desperately tired. Trevanion was as unwearied as Cornish patience, but Richards was not trying to tired out Trevanion – physically.
It lacked five minutes of the noon hour