A reference to his map rea.s.sured him, and he went on. But now a fresh doubt a.s.sailed him. Suppose his lamp should go out: how would it be possible to get back?

If he had been ready to give way to them there were hundreds of such fear-engendered thoughts ready to oppress him; but he fought against them steadily, and was the master as he plodded on, with his faintly marked shadow, distorted and broken as it fell upon the walls, forming his only companion in his quest.

"Poor mother!" he thought once; "how alarmed she would be if she could see me now!"

"But it must be done," he added, half aloud. "Ours is notoriously a fiery mine. Ah! it is foul here."

For the lamp began to sputter and burn dimly within the gauze for a few minutes, till he reached a more open place, thinking--"If I can get this task done, I shall have made the mine comparatively safe, and who knows but the old workings may not prove, with our modern appliances, well worthy of carrying on?"

He was so elated by these thoughts that the remainder of his dark subterranean journey seemed not one-half as difficult; and at last he seated himself on a block of stone fallen from the roof to consult his map.

"Let me see," he said, half aloud, as, with the map spread upon his knees, he held his lamp so that the dim light might the better fall upon the canvas-backed paper; "I must be about here; and if so, according to this plan the old mine workings might be reached through this gallery, or this, or this."

He ran his finger along the different lines drawn in red ink, and was studiously considering how it would be best to proceed if he could win his father, and, through him, the other proprietors, to his plans, when all at once he started up, listening attentively, for it seemed to him that he could hear a sound as of some one working with pick or bar away ahead of the place where he was seated, and not back in the yielding seams of the pit.

_Tap_, _tap_, _tap_! Yes, there it was plainly enough, and from a part of the pit where there could be no working going on.

What could it be? n.o.body would be in that end of the mine. It was completely deserted. He did not believe anyone had been in that part of the great maze for months; there was nothing to bring a pitman there.

"Now if I were a superst.i.tious fellow," said Philip to himself, "and ready to believe in ghosts and goblins, I should run back and spread the news that this part of the pit is haunted by the restless spirit of some poor pitman who lost his life here years ago, and comes back to work.

But I don't believe in that sort of story, and I'm going to see what it means."

All the same he felt very much startled; for it seemed so unaccountable for anyone to be there. The men would be in the regular seams. There was nothing to bring them here; and as they toiled at piece-work, they would not lift a pick except to hew out coal. No overman would be here without his knowledge; and try how he would to find some reason for the sound, he was still at fault. The only possibility was that, in some peculiar way the echo of a hewer's pick ran along the silent galleries, to be reverberated from this distant wall.

"Impossible!" he said, doubling up his map and replacing it in his breast, as he rose and took up his lamp.

"It is impossible!" he said again, as _tap_, _tap_, _tap_, the regular stroke as of a pick was heard, and with no small feeling of trepidation he went to search out the cause of the unusual sound.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

PARKS'S MARK.

Before he had gone far he became aware that the noise came from the old gallery that he had marked down as being the most likely to lead nearest to the workings of the ancient pit, and, after carefully peering down it, he held his lamp above his head to gaze in farther. But he could see nothing; and suddenly the noise ceased.

With a quick motion Philip thrust the tall, thin lamp inside his flannel mine-coat and b.u.t.toned it up, for the thought suddenly struck him that if anyone was at work there he would be sure to have a light.

It turned out as he expected, for there, upon a ledge of rock about fifty yards ahead, stood a Davy-lamp, shedding its soft dull rays around, so that some fell upon a wall of coal, which glistened in the light as if it had been newly cut.

"It is very strange," thought Philip. "Why should anyone be at work here? It is dangerous, too. The old mine full of water must be close behind."

"Well," he said, "Davy-lamps are not at all ghost-like things, so let us see what it all means;" and going cautiously forward, with his own lamp hidden, he crept near enough to see that there was a heavy iron bar lying upon the flooring of the wide chamber, for the gallery had been opened out here, and beside it a heap of newly-chipped coal, the result of an effort evidently being made to bore through into the ancient pit.

"Why, it is treachery!" exclaimed Philip mentally. "Someone is trying to flood--Ah!"

A tremendous blow fell upon his head, and he dropped to the ground, motionless, stunned as it were in body; but with every faculty of his mind quickened, and, with his eyes half-closed, he saw a dark figure stride across him, a short iron bar in his hand, pick up the lamp and hold it down.

"Yes, I ar'n't made no mistake, Muster Hex'on. I said I'd mak' my mark on yo, and yo've got it this time. How came he here?"

The man stood in a listening att.i.tude for a few moments, and then, apparently satisfied, raised his bar to strike again.

"That first un seems to hev done it," he said with a coa.r.s.e laugh.

"Spying, that's what he was about. Now I'll give them a job."

He set down the lamp once more upon the ledge, picked up the big bar, and began to drive it heavily in the hole he had made in the coal, the great bar going in quite three feet at each stroke, while Philip lay watching him, paralysed still in body, but seeing all that took place.

At the end of half-a-dozen strokes the bar seemed to go through farther, and as the great miner drew it back a little stream of dirty water came trickling through, and Parks stood watching it intently.

"I knowed it wur theer," he muttered; "but it'll never make no head if I don't open it a bit more."

He hesitated for a moment, and then, raising the bar once more, drove it through with all his force.

The effect was very different to what he had antic.i.p.ated, for he must have dislodged a goodly-sized piece of coal on the other side, and as he s.n.a.t.c.hed back the bar there was a fierce rush of water in a spurt as big as a man's arm, whose flash Philip Hexton just saw, and then the lamp was extinguished.

The noise was so great--such a fierce, hissing roar--that the cry uttered by Ebenezer Parks was half drowned; while, in less time than it takes to tell it, the young deputy felt a sudden shock as a rush of cold water bathed his face and head, acting so magically that he rose quickly, and, with the water rising above his ankles, began to feel his way along the stony wall, as fast as he could, in the direction in which he had come.

The confusion from the blow was rapidly pa.s.sing away, cleared as it was by a great horror--that of being overtaken and drowned in the flooding mine, and, sometimes striking himself heavily, but always making progress, he waded on.

Still it was slow work, for the water seemed to hinder him, and he had reached a curve where the gallery took a fresh direction when there was a fiercer roar behind, one which betokened that the water was forcing for itself a greater way; and so it proved, for in a very few moments the rushing icy stream was above his knees.

It was very horrible there in the darkness, listening to the gurgling rush of the water, ever increasing in violence; but forgetting self for the moment, Philip wondered where his a.s.sailant could be, and then, hearing nothing, he began to think of the men in the pit, and whether they would have time to escape.

All depended, he knew, upon whether the wall of coal between the two mines stood firm where Ebenezer's bar had not struck, and hoping this would be so, but despairing of his own life now, he waded on, the water being far above his knees.

"I shall never find my way in the dark," he groaned, with a chilly feeling of horror creeping over him, and placing his hands above his throbbing breast as if to check the beating of his heart, he uttered a cry of joy, for they came in contact with the lamp.

It was, of course, extinct as he tore it from his breast, but he had matches in his pocket far above where the water had yet reached.

It was a risk, but he must chance the gas. The air caused by the rushing water might have swept it away, and trembling so that he could hardly perform the office, he drew key and matches from his pockets, nearly, in his agitation, dropping the lamp in the rushing stream that swept against his legs.

He saved it, though, and struck a match, which went out directly, and another and another shared its fate. The next burned brightly, though, and no explosion following, he lit the lamp, trimmed the wick, dropped the match in the water, where it went out with a faint hiss; and then, closing the gauze, he held the feeble Davy above his head.

It was a star of hope, though, to him; and so it must have been to Ebenezer Parks; for as the rays shone out, there came from far behind a wild, despairing yell, and then, as Philip turned towards it, there was a fierce hissing rush, the stream doubled in volume, he was swept against the wall, and it was only by hurrying with it that he was able to keep his feet.

Twice over he essayed to turn, but the effort was vain. It was impossible to battle with it. All he could do was to hold his lamp up so as to guide him from striking against the wall, and go with the rushing stream, that now increased so in depth that he felt that before long he might be compelled to swim.

The hours or more that he pa.s.sed in that flood of rushing waters seemed afterwards like some terrible confused dream to the young man, for it was long enough before he found himself in a part where the galleries took an upward inclination, and he gained a place where, faint and exhausted, he could rest with the water only about to his knees, and draw out the map, by whose help he at length made out where he was.

Even then he had a long and arduous trial before he managed to wade to the foot of the shaft late at night, to find lights burning and the pumping-engine at its fullest speed, but unable to arrest the steady rise of the water, which, by the next day, had completely drowned the workings, though its progress was sufficiently slow to enable the men to save their lives before it came upon them in the lower seams.

A fortnight elapsed before the pit was once more drained, during which time Philip had been seriously ill, suffering greatly from the shock.

His first inquiry was for Ebenezer Parks, whose body, however, was not found for some time, where it had been forced into a cranny by the stream; and in strange corroboration of the tale Philip Hexton had to tell, his great muscular hand still grasped the big iron bar, round which the muscles were as tense as steel.

Poor wretch! In the gratification of his miserable malice he had done much mischief and had lost his life; but he had hastened Philip Hexton's plan of utilising the shaft of the old mine, which his villainous act had drained, and the result before long was that the old pit property was purchased for a mere song, the galleries fully opened out, and the mine, over which Philip became overseer-in-chief, was acknowledged with its double shaft to be the best-ventilated and safest in the land.

The best proof of which was that for the next ten years there was not a single serious accident; and, as Mrs Hexton declared to her friends, all through the thoughtfulness of her brave boy.