"Oh yes, you can, sir, if you don't mind crawling a bit now and then.

You can go miles and miles where the stone's split apart. I think it's all cracks under the hills."

"On you go, then; but don't you want a candle?"

"No, sir; I can see best like this, with you holding the light behind."

Mark relapsed into silence, and his guide remained silent too, and went on and on, along pa.s.sages formed by the busy miners of the past, in following the lode of lead, and along ways that were nature's work.

At last, fully an hour after Dummy had announced how far they had to go, he stopped short, took a candle, lit it, and looked smilingly at Mark, who gazed round the natural cavern in which they were, and then turned to his guide.

"Well," he said, "is this it? Not much of a place. I thought you said it went farther."

"So it does, Master Mark. Shut your eyes while you count a hundred."

Mark obeyed, and counted his hundred aloud, opened his eyes again, and he was alone.

"Here! Where are you?" he cried; and he looked about the place, up and down, but to all appearances, he was in a _cul de sac_, whose walls were dotted with the fossil stems of _pentacrinites_, over which stalagmitic petrifaction had gradually formed, looking as if dirty water had run over the walls in places, and hardened in the course of time to stone.

"Here, Dummy! Haven't run back, have you?" shouted Mark, as it occurred to him that should the boy have played him a trick, he would have no little difficulty in getting back to the part where the men were at work.

But there was no occasion for so loud a cry; the words had hardly pa.s.sed his lips when a hand holding a candle suddenly appeared against the wall in front, and upon stepping to it, he found that the sheet of stalagmite there, instead of touching the wall, was a foot away, leaving room for any one to creep up a steep slope for thirty or forty feet, and continue the way through a long crevice, whose sides looked as if they might have separated only a few hours before.

"This is the way," said Dummy, and he led on for a quarter of an hour longer, with a peculiar rushing noise growing louder, till it became a heavy dull roar, as the narrow crack through which they had pa.s.sed suddenly opened out into a vast cavity which, below the ledge on which they stood, ended in gloom, and whose roof was lost in the same blackness; but the echoes of the falling water below told them that it must be far enough above their heads.

"What a horrible hole!" cried Mark.

"Yes; big," said Dummy. "Look: I climbed along there. It's easy; and then you can go right on, above where the water comes in. It's warm in here."

"Yes, warm enough."

"Shall we go any farther?"

"No, not to-day. Let's stop and look. Shall I throw down my candle?"

"No, Master Mark: it's no good. Goes out too soon. I'll light a match."

He took an old-fashioned brimstone match from his breast, lit both its pointed ends, waited till the sulphur was fluttering its blue flame, and the splint was getting well alight and blackening, and then he reached out and let it fall, to go burning brightly down and down, as if into a huge well. Then it went out, and they seemed for the moment to be in darkness.

"I don't think it's very, very deep," said Dummy quietly; "but it's all water over yonder. Seen enough, Master Mark!"

"Yes, for one day. Let's go back now."

Dummy topped the long wicks with his natural snuffers, to wit, his finger and thumb, and led the way back, after Mark had taken a final glance at the vast chasm.

"So you found this place out, Dummy?"

"Yes, Master Mark. I'm always looking for new holes when I've nothing to do and the men aren't at work."

"It's of no use: there's no lead."

"No: aren't any ore. All spar and stones like this."

"Well, we must bring hammers and find some good pieces next time we come."

"And go on along by the water, Master Mark?"

"If you like. Want to find how far it goes?"

"Yes: I want to find how far it goes, master. Perhaps it opens somewhere. I often think we must come out somewhere on the other side."

"That would be queer," said Mark thoughtfully; "but I don't think my father would be pleased. Seem like making a way for the Darleys to come in and attack us."

Dummy stopped short, and turned to stare open-mouthed at his young chief.

"What a head you've got, Master Mark," he said. "I never thought of that."

"Didn't you? Well, you see now: we don't want to find another way in."

"Yes, we do, if there is one, Master Mark, and stop it up."

Very little more was said as they went back, Mark becoming thoughtful, and too tired to care about speaking. But that night he lay in bed awake for some time, thinking about the visit to the cavernous mine, and how it honeycombed the mountainous place: then about Dummy's witches, and the fire and caldron, at the mouth of the hole by Ergles, a mighty limestone ridge about three miles away. Then after a laugh at the easy way in which the superst.i.tious country people were alarmed, he fell asleep, to begin a troublous dream, which was mixed up in a strangely confused way with the great chasm in the mine, down which he had worked his way to get at the ravens' nest: and then he started into wakefulness, as he was falling down and down, hundreds upon hundreds of feet, to find his face wet with perspiration, and that he had been lying upon his back.

CHAPTER TEN.

IN A WASP'S NEST.

Days had pa.s.sed, and strange reports were flying about the spa.r.s.ely inhabited neighbourhood. Fresh people had seen the witches in their long gowns, and it was rumoured that if any one dared to make the venture, they might be found crouching over their fire any dark, stormy night on the slope of Ergles, where n.o.body ever went, for it was a desolate waste, where a goat might have starved.

The tales grew like s...o...b..a.l.l.s, as they pa.s.sed from mouth to mouth, but for the most part they were very unsubstantial in all points save one, and that possessed substance; not only lambs, but sheep, had disappeared, and in the case of a miner and his wife, who lived some distance off, and who had been away for a week to a wedding beyond the mountains, they returned to their solitary cottage to find that it had been entered in their absence, and completely stripped of everything movable, even to the bed, while the very cabbages in the garden had been torn up and carried away.

Mark had the news from the man himself, and he carried it to his father and sister, as he had carried Dummy Rugg's rumour about the witches and their fire, which went out so suddenly on being seen.

"Humph!" said Sir Edward, smiling; "that looks as if the witches liked vegetables with their lamb and mutton. Stripped the cottage, and took the meal-tub too?"

"Everything, father," said Mark.

"Then it's time the men made a search, my boy," said Sir Edward; "we must have a robber about. There is the whole explanation of the old women's tales. Well, they will have to bestir themselves, and catch the thief."

It was on that same morning that the news reached Cliff Castle, where similar stories had floated about witches and warlocks having taken possession of the shivering hills, where the slatey rocks were always falling, and forming what the country people called screes, which, at a distance, when wet and shiny, looked in the sunshine like cascades descending from on high.

"If it comes to any of our sheep being taken, we shall have to take to a hunt, Ralph," Sir Morton had said. "The people like to have a witch or two to curdle their blood, but I'm not going to find them in sheep."

It was a glorious morning, and the lad went into the courtyard with his sister to have a look at her new fad, as Nick Garth called it, that is to say, the well-plastered pool with its surrounding of rock-work, in which various plants were beginning to flourish and reflect themselves in the crystal water with which the little pond was filled.

"Capital!" cried Ralph; "but you ought to have a few fish in it. They'd look well."