tered the ruined shed
which covered the opening of the shaft. He gazed down into the dark
abyss--nothing was to be seen. He listened--nothing was to be heard.

"And my lamp!" he exclaimed; "suppose it isn't in its place!" The lamp
which Ryan used when he visited the pit was usually deposited in a
corner, near the landing of the topmost ladder. It had disappeared.

"Here is a nuisance!" said Jack, beginning to feel rather uneasy. Then,
without hesitating, superstitious though he was, "I will go," said he,
"though it's as dark down there as in the lowest depths of the infernal
regions!"

And he began to descend the long flight of ladders, which led down the
gloomy shaft. Jack Ryan had not forgotten his old mining habits, and
he was well acquainted with the Dochart pit, or he would scarcely have
dared to venture thus. He went very carefully, however. His foot tried
each round, as some of them were worm-eaten. A false step would entail a
deadly fall, through this space of fifteen hundred feet. He counted each
landing as he passed it, knowing that he could not reach the bottom of
the shaft until he had left the thirtieth. Once there, he would have no
trouble, so he thought, in finding the cottage, built, as we have said,
at the extremity of the principal passage.

Jack Ryan went on thus until he got to the twenty-sixth landing, and
consequently had two hundred feet between him and the bottom.

Here he put down his leg to feel for the first rung of the
twenty-seventh ladder. But his foot swinging in space found nothing to
rest on. He knelt down and felt about with his hand for the top of the
ladder. It was in vain.

"Old Nick himself must have been down this way!" said Jack, not without
a slight feeling of terror.

He stood considering for some time, with folded arms, and longing to be
able to pierce the impenetrable darkness. Then it occurred to him that
if he could not get down, neither could the inhabitants of the mine get
up. There was now no communication between the depths of the pit and the
upper regions. If the removal of the lower ladders of the Yarrow shaft
had been effected since his last visit to the cottage, what had become
of Simon Ford, his wife, his son, and the engineer?

The prolonged absence of James Starr proved that he had not left the pit
since the day Ryan met with him in the shaft. How had the cottage been
provisioned since then? The food of these unfortunate people, imprisoned
fifteen hundred