stly secret
hidden within it. A muffled exclamation, half of admiration, half of
awe, broke from the circling crowd as, the ladder planted, Richard was
seen descending it torch in hand. No other man followed; none had
volunteered, and he had asked for no companion. They watched him, as the
countrymen of those who had formerly worked Wheal Danes might have
watched Curtius when he leaped into the gulf; and as in _his_ case, when
they saw the ladder removed, and the light grow dim, and finally die out
before their eyes, it seemed that the pit had closed on Richard--that he
was swallowed up alive. No one, unless the strange story about their
missing neighbor which this man had brought was true, had ventured into
Wheal Danes for these fifty years! They kept an awe-struck silence,
straining eye and ear. Some thought they could still see a far-off
glimmer, others that they could hear a stifled cry, when the less
fortunate or the less imaginative could hear or see nothing. But after a
little darkness and silence reigned supreme beneath them; they seemed
standing on the threshold of a tomb.

CHAPTER XLVII.

WHAT WAS FOUND IN WHEAL DANES.

A full half hour--which to the watchers above seemed a much longer
interval--had elapsed since Richard had disappeared in the depths of
Wheal Danes, and not a sign of his return had reached the attentive
throng.

"I thought he'd come to harm," muttered a fisherman to his neighbor; "it
was a sin and a shame to let him venture."

"Ay, you may say that," returned the other, aloud. "I call it downright
murder in them as sent him."

"It was not I as sent him," observed the inn-keeper, with the honest
indignation of a man that has not right habitually on his own side.
"What _I_ said to the gentleman was, 'Wait till morning.' Why should _I_
send him?" Here he stopped, though his reasons for not wishing to hurry
matters would have been quite conclusive.

"Why was he let to go down at all, being a stranger?" resumed the first
speaker. "Why didn't somebody show him the way?"

"Because nobody knowed it," answered one of the four miners whose
services Richard had retained, and who justly imagined that the
fisherman's remark had been a reflection on his own profession. "I'd ha'
gone down Dunloppel with him at midnight, or any other mine as can be
called such; but this is different."

"Ay, ay, that's so," said a second miner. "We know no more of this place
than you fishermen. There may be