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They advanced in single file, James Penrose leading. The height of the adit permitted of their walking almost upright, but the irregularity of the cuttings rendered it necessary that they should advance carefully, with special regard to their heads.
Then the pines about the mine were small and damaged by wind and forest-fires. It was difficult to find timber that would bear a heavy strain, and Thirlwell walked long distances in the stinging frost to look for proper logs, and now and then camped with his choppers behind a snowbank. For all that, he made progress, and as he pushed on the adit his confidence in the vein grew stronger.
They would make for the adit, he thought, and so gain the shaft and come up by the ladders, if, indeed, John Thomas was in any state to climb ladders. "Bring some brandy," he shouted to one of the men, and ran on. Nance was more to him than all the miners in Sark, and it was not brandy she would be wanting, he knew, but her clothes.
The hollows beneath them were lost in a woolly vapor, low-flying scud raked the bare ridges above, and even as they passed a black rift in the hillside the first heavy drops of rain fell pattering. Helen Savine had seen many a mining adit in British Columbia, and, turning to glance at the mouth of the tunnel, she read, scratched on the rock beside it, "Thurston's Folly."
They ran down the adit, with Devine in front swinging a blinking lamp, and crawled out, gasping, into the cold evening air as dusk was closing down. Then they sat around and waited until there was a crash and a muffled rumbling. Weston stood up, but Saunders made a sign of expostulation. "You just sit down again and take a smoke," he said. "We've got to give her quite a while yet."
So intent was he that every now and then he swung the heavy hammer long after his turn had run out, without asking for relief; and Saunders judiciously permitted him to undertake the more arduous task. By and by, however, Devine crept back to join them, and, when at length morning broke and the mouth of the adit glimmered faintly, Weston glanced at his bleeding hands as he flung down the hammer.
Indeed, on one of the stages, when he stopped for a moment's breathing, he kissed the little garments devoutly, and then laughed shamefacedly at himself for his foolishness, and glanced round quickly lest any should have witnessed it. So down, down, till he came to the level, and crept along the adit to the shore.
These are the Heinrichssohle, in the Stockwerk at Altenberg, where the mean of two years' observations gives the temperature 0°·54 F. lower at a depth of 400 feet than at the surface; the adit of Henneberg, on the Ingelbach, near Johanngeorgenstadt, where the temperature was again 0°·54 F. lower than in shafts some hundred feet higher; and the Weiss Adler adit, on the left declivity of the valley of the Schwarzwasser, above the Antonshütte.
Murray's busy right now bossing those three shifts of miners that are driving that adit tunnel, but when he gets the time he'll leave his glass eye on a fence post and come over to see what we're doing. Didn't you ever hear about Murray's glass eye? "Well, they say he lost his good one looking for a dollar that he dropped; but here's the big joke about the fence-post.
After witnessing this process, we visited the mine itself, which outcropped near the apex of the hill, about a thousand feet above the furnaces. It was then, and is now, a most valuable mine. The adit of the mine was at the apex of the hill, which drooped off to the north.
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