Part 11 (1/2)
All through he had been the sufferer, and if he did this thing he must suffer still more--always he who must pay.
The man who hesitates is lost, or saved. When the contemplator of evil deeds begins also to contemplate consequences, reason is beginning to resume her sway.
Then he heard heavy footsteps and voices. His father and Stephen Gard.
Another chance! Gard he hated. There was a bruise on his right jaw still. And the old man!--he had cut him out of his inheritance by going crazy over those cursed mines.
”I'm sorry you have gone so far,” Gard was saying as they pa.s.sed. ”If you had consulted me I should have advised against it. Mining is always more or less of a speculation. I would never, if I could help it, let any man put more into a mine than he can afford to lose.”
”If you know a thing's a good thing you want all you can get out of it,” said old Tom stoutly.
”Yes, if--” and they pa.s.sed into the house, while Tom in the hedge was considering which of them he would soonest see dead.
Now they were all inside together. A full charge of small shot might do considerable and satisfactory damage.
But thought of the certain consequences to himself welled coldly up in him again, and he slunk noiselessly away, cursing himself for leaving undone the work he had come out to do.
On the common above the Pot, a terrified white scut rose almost under his feet and sped along in front of him. He blew it into rags, and was so ashamed of his prowess that he kicked the remnants into the gorse and went home empty-handed.
CHAPTER IX
HOW OLD TOM FOUND THE SILVER HEART
One of the first things Stephen Gard had seen to, when he got matters into his own hands, was the safeguarding of the mines from ever-possible irruption of the sea. The great steam pumps kept the workings reasonably clear of drainage water, but no earthly power could drain the sea if it once got in.
The central shafts had sunk far below sea-level. The lateral galleries had, in some cases, run out seawards and were now extending far under the sea itself.
From the whirling coils of the tides and races round the coast, he judged that the sea-bed was as seamed and broken and full of faults as the visible cliffs ash.o.r.e.
In bad weather, the men in those submarine galleries and the outbranching tunnels could hear the crash of the waves above their heads, and the rolling and grinding of the mighty boulders with which they disported.
If, by chance, the sea should break through, the peril to life and property would be great.
He therefore caused to be constructed and fitted inside each tunnel, at the point where it branched from its main gallery, a stout iron door, roughly hinged at the top and falling, in case of need, into the f.l.a.n.g.e of a thick wooden frame. The framework was fitted to the opening on the seaward side, in a groove cut deep into the rock round each side and top and bottom. The heavy iron door, when open, lay up against the roof of the tunnel and was supported by two wooden legs. If the sea should break through, the first rush of the water would sweep away the supporting legs, the iron door would fall with a crash into the f.l.a.n.g.e of the wooden frame, and the greater the pressure the tighter it would fit.
So the weight of the sea would seal the iron door against the wooden cas.e.m.e.nt, which would swell and press always tighter against the rock, and that boring would be closed for ever. And if any man should be inside the tunnel when the sea broke through, there he must stop, drowned like a rat in its hole, unless by a miracle he could make his way along the tunnel before the trap-door fell.
Gard never ceased to enjoin the utmost caution on the men who undertook these outermost experimental borings.
His strict injunctions were to cease work at the first sign of water in these undersea tunnels, make for the gallery, close the trap, and await events.
Believing absolutely in the existence of one or more great central deposits whence all these thin veins of silver had come, and hoping to strike them at every blow of his pick, old Tom Hamon was the keenest explorer and opener of new leads in the mine.
”The silver's there all right,” he said, time and again, ”it only wants finding,” and he pushed ahead, here and there, wherever he thought the chances most favourable.
He took his rightful pay along with the rest for the work he did, but it was not for wages he wrought. Ever just beyond the point of his energetic pick lay fortune, and he was after it with all his heart and soul and bodily powers.
For months he had been following up a vein which ran out under the sea, and grew richer and richer as he laid it bare. He believed it would lead him to the mother vein, and that to the heart of all the Sark silver.