on which Sam Leggo had last seen
the Lord Proprietor sitting with his gun across his knees. But why she
had brought them to this spot the two men were as far as ever from
guessing; for almost straight beneath them lay the sea.

After a minute's rest Vashti lowered herself over the western edge of
the rock, at the same time warning them to follow with extreme caution;
and so all three came to the ledge of the adit. But their business did
not lie here. Indeed, in the darkness neither Sir Ommaney nor the
Commandant observed the opening, and Vashti had no leisure to call
their attention to it. Clambering, still to the left, across a boulder
which fairly overhung the sea, she struck a match, lit the candle in
her lantern, and held it up before a dark hole--a second adit--pierced
in the cliff-side and running west, as the other ran south-by-east.

"Be careful, now!" she warned them again, and ducked her head as she
entered the tunnel, which was scarcely more than five feet high. They
stooped and followed down the slope of it for about thirty yards, and
halted behind her as she waved the lantern over what appeared at first
to be a terrific chasm, opening at her feet.

"Eli, ahoy! Ahoy, there!" she called.

"Ahoy!" the voice came up from the depths. "Ahoy, there, Vashti!"

"I have brought the Commandant, with a friend--and the tackle. Shall I
fix it here?"

"That's no work for you, my dear," called up Eli. "Let them come down
if they've heads for it, and afterwards I can climb up and fix it. Or,
stay! Let the one come down, and the other bide aloft, to help me."

"Do you dare?" Vashti asked the Commandant, pointing down to the pit,
and then with a wave of her lantern indicating the stairway by which he
must descend. It was a ladder of rope, suspended from an iron bar
driven into the solid rock about a foot above the floor-level on which
they stood. It dangled down into darkness, and the Commandant perceived
to his horror that its iron rungs lay close against the cliff.

"Surely you are never going down that way?" he asked.

But Vashti was already stooping to slip off her shoes.

"You need not follow unless you choose."

"Where you go, I go. Let me lead the way."

But while he unlaced and kicked off his boots she had already grasped
the iron bar and swung herself out over the abyss, feeling with her
toes for a rung and a good foothold.

"For my part," said Sir Ommaney, controlling with some difficulty the
tremor