'Don't do anything, please,' Kitty said. 'Go back to Wheal Garth. I'll come down to you there, just as soon as I've cleared the supper things away. I promise,' she added.
I looked down at her. I'd forgotten all about my need of her in that sudden surge of rage. I could feel her body close against me as she held my arm. She stepped back. I suddenly felt cold and drained. She was watching me, wondering what I was going to do. Her face was pale and her breath was coming fast through her half-open lips. 'Guess I'd better go,' I said. 'I'll wait for you at the mine.'
She nodded and turned away towards the range. I went out again into the moonlight. I could hear Friar's voice behind the curtained windows of the outhouse dining-room. I went round the house and started towards Wheal Garth. And then I stopped. Directly ahead of me, in black silhouette against the silver of the sea, I saw Old Manack going down towards the mine.
My muscles tensed. If the swine were going down the mine. I'd have him there. But he wouldn't be such a fool. Surely he wouldn't be such a fool. I waited tense with excitement, until his figure disappeared down the dip of the slope. I crossed the old mine workings then and from the top of the slope I watched him making for the sheds. Once he stopped and looked back almost as though he feared I might be following him. I dropped close to the ground. He hadn't seen me, for he went on and, when he reached the mine, he went into the store shed. I scrambled down the slope. When he came out again, I was concealed amongst the gorse that surrounded the shaft to the hideout. He had a helmet and overalls on and he carried a lamp. But he didn't go to the hoist. He went on down the slope.
He was making straight for the shaft he used — the shaft where his wife had been killed. The rim of its protecting wall showed like a ghostly circle amongst the brambles. I could have laughed aloud. To play right into my hands like this! I'd get the truth from him now. I'd wring it out of him down there in the bowels of his own damned mine.
The old man had reached the top of the shaft now. He turned and glanced about him. It was a furtive glance. He wanted to be unobserved. What the hell was he doing going down the mine at this time of night? And why did he use that shaft? What fatal fascination was there for him in that place? And then another thought flashed into my mind. A man who could cold-bloodedly throw a dog down a shaft was capable of anything. That thought was to recur more than once before the night was out.
Satisfied that no one was watching him, Manack climbed over the protecting wall. He stood for a moment on the inside, his head and shoulders visible as he looked up towards the house. Then he disappeared.
I didn't stop to think. I'd forgotten all about Kitty. I had my torch. I could be down in the main adit as soon as he was. I ran to the hoist and tumbled into the gig, flinging the lever over as I shut the door. And slowly the cage sank into the dripping darkness of Wheal Garth.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pisky-Led
I stopped the gig at the main adit level and with my hand cupped over my torch so that it showed only a glimmer of red light, I hurried down the gallery. The air was very still. No wind blew up from the sea. There was no sound of waves. The only sound was the drip of water. The quiet of the place magnified the sound. The drip of water and the stillness both seemed merged. It was as though night had seeped down into the galleries and the mine slept.
The adit seemed longer than when I had come down it with Captain Manack. I was almost running. I was afraid I had missed the old man. But when I reached the bend that brought me in sight of the bottom of the shaft he used, there was his lamp glowing yellow against the walls of the gallery. I stopped then. The old man was going down the gallery towards the sea. I followed. I had switched off my torch. I could see the shape of the gallery against the distant light of his lamp.
A ghostly glimmer of moonlight filtered down into the gallery as I went past the shaft by which he had descended. Glancing up, I could see the ladders snaking up over the dripping rock walls. Ahead of me the light of his lamp disappeared. He had turned off to the right. The gallery was suddenly dark. I switched on my torch and almost ran to the point where his light had disappeared. He had turned up a cross-cut. I thought he must be going down to the Mermaid. But when I turned into the crosscut and reached the shaft leading to the Mermaid, it was just a black hole with the rungs of a ladder sticking up out of it. I switched off my torch and stood there in the darkness, listening. All about me was the drip and gush of water. Behind was the sigh and gurgle of the sea in the adit. And ahead the rhythmic suck of the pump. The unearthly stillness of the mine was full of sound. No chance of hearing a man's movements.
The cross-cut forked just beyond the open hole of the shaft. I chose the right-hand one. It was little more than a cleft in the rock, about the height and width of a man. It sloped sharply down and then levelled off with ochre-coloured water ankle deep. My boots were full of it. The roof came gradually lower until I was bending almost double. I hit my head on a protruding rock and cursed. I uncupped my torch and shone the powerful beam ahead of me. The tunnel straightened out until I could see at least fifty yards along it. No sign of Manack. I knew then I had taken the wrong turning, for I had not been that far behind him.
I turned and hurried back. The left-hand fork was no wider than the other and it, too, sloped down. My water-logged boots squelched in the thick ooze that formed the floor. The sound of the pump grew louder till its rhythmic thump and suck filled my ears to the exclusion of anything else. With it was the gush of rushing water. The tunnel levelled off, heightened and broadened and, round a bend, I came upon the pump. A giant waterwheel turned slowly in a deep cleft. Water poured with the force of a small fall from the roof of the cleft. It fell with its full weight on the rear of the wheel, turned it and then disappeared into a black abyss below, sucking and gurgling in its haste to get to the sea. From the side of the wheel a big arm thrust up and down working the bob of the pump. The bob was a great beam, as big as a tree, pivoted at the centre. It rocked up and down like a see-saw, the farther end attached to a long rod which disappeared into the pump shaft. At each thrust there was a great gurgling and sucking. Then it would rise and a mass of water would surge into a narrow adit cut through the rock beyond.
It was a monstrous piece of mechanism. Groaning and sucking down there in the depths of the mine, it was like a prehistoric monster. It was part of the mine itself. It went on working night and day, automatically, without ceasing. It was the sort of contraption the old Cornish miners had used before the days of steam. I'd seen pictures of them in old mining books. But I'd never actually seen one before.
I took all this in at a glance as I dodged under the bobbing beam and hurried on along the tunnel. The rhythmic thumping of the giant pump became muffled and resonant as the roof of the tunnel closed down on me. At one place I had to crawl on my hands and knees through cold ochre-coloured water. Then the passage broadened out and the roof rose up and suddenly vanished. I shone my torch upwards. I was no longer in a tunnel, but in a great gap where a tin bearing seam had been ripped out leaving the bare rock on either side. Sloping all the way they must have cleared to a height of almost two hundred feet. The beam of my torch could just pick out the roof. It seemed as though the rock, which sloped up at an angle, must grind together at any moment, closing the two-foot gap.