“Hang on, old man!” called back Chet. “That’s the best I can tell you.” The walls of the shaft, however, did make a natural stairway; and at a pinch one might have climbed down and up again without recourse to the knotted rope. However, the rope enabled the boys to swing from side to side of the shaft, as the footing seemed better. John Peep’s lantern cast sufficient light upward for the chums to see where they stepped. Indeed, all the light from the candle flickered on the walls above the descending Indian; the bottom of the pit was in utter darkness. It was a slow descent, as was natural, and the shaft was very deep. As they had climbed so much higher than the plateau where the Crayton shaft was sunk, naturally this pit must be much deeper if it reached the old tunnel in which the Crayton gold vein had petered out in the old gold-mining days. It was gruesome, too. Even Dig Fordham seemed to have lost his voice at the top of the shaft. An occasional grunt from John Peep was all the vocal sound that was made by the three for some time. The white boys’ leather-shod feet scraping the rocks was the principal sound, for the Indian’s tread in his moccasins was silent. This continued until finally Dig could restrain himself no longer. “By the last hoptoad that was chased out of Ireland! How long’s this going to keep up? Is that Indian going to keep climbing down this hole forever?” “Hush, Dig!” commanded Chet. “I did not make the place,” said John Peep, with scorn. “White boy scared—he’d better have stayed out. Havens come. He not scared.” “I’m not scared!” yelled Dig, his voice booming in the shaft. “By the last hoptoad—” “And that’s silly,” interrupted John Peep quickly. “There is a legend to the effect that St. Patrick drove all the reptilian species out of Ireland; but it is doubtful if the eviction included the so-called common, or garden, toad.” “Whew!” gasped Dig. “Did you hear that, Chet?” His chum was chuckling and did not answer. Dig tried to treat John Peep as though he were an uneducated “blanket Indian,” as the uncultivated redmen were called. But John Peep had been some years at school and was notably the brightest scholar in his class. Why he had taken to the woods and preferred to live in the wilderness, now that vacation had begun, Chet could only surmise. It was just then that the Indian reached the bottom of the shaft. Or, rather, he reached the place where a hole was broken through the wall into the tunnel from the Crayton shaft. Here a circular cavern had been hollowed out in past ages by the falling water; the subterranean stream finding an outlet at one side, where another pit dropped away into the heart of the mountain to an unknown depth. The circular cavern was a most beautiful place, crystal stalactites hanging from its arched roof, while pointed stalagmites were strewn over the floor.