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"Any information concerning him is requested to be sent to the President of the Royal Institution, Edinburgh." Jack Ryan, stopping before one of these advertisements, read it twice over, with extreme surprise. "Mr. Starr!" he exclaimed. "Why, on the 4th of December I met him with Harry on the ladder of the Dochart pit! That was ten days ago! And he has not been seen from that time!
This was to get us up at once into the tops of the mountains: to go round by a circuit, turning the heads of Glen Lyon, Glen Lochay, and Glen Dochart, and come down upon the lowlands by Kippen and the upper waters of the Forth. Alan was little pleased with a route which led us through the country of his blood-foes, the Glenorchy Campbells.
TEN minutes afterwards, James Starr and Harry issued from the principal gallery. They were now standing in a glade, if we may use this word to designate a vast and dark excavation. The place, however, was not entirely deprived of daylight. A few rays straggled in through the opening of a deserted shaft. It was by means of this pipe that ventilation was established in the Dochart pit.
The pipers played at intervals, the boatmen sang Gaelic songs, and the representative of Macdougal of Lorn steered. At Auchmore, where the party lunched, they were rejoined by the Highland Guard. As her Majesty drove round by Glen Dochart and Glen Ogle, the latter reminded her of the fatal Kyber Pass with which her thoughts had been busy in the beginning of the year.
"You know that I shall be always glad to see you, and talk over old times." "I know that, Mr. Starr." "My house in Edinburgh is always open to you." "It's a long way off, is Edinburgh!" answered the man shaking his head. "Ay, a long way from the Dochart pit." "A long way, Simon? Where do you mean to live?" "Even here, Mr. Starr!
This was the only way of communication which existed between the bottom of the Dochart pit and the open air. As to air, that came in by the Yarrow shaft, from whence galleries communicated with another shaft whose orifice opened at a higher level; the warm air naturally escaped by this species of inverted siphon.
An hour after leaving Callander they reached the Dochart pit. The most indifferent person would have been touched at the appearance this deserted spot presented. It was like the skeleton of something that had formerly lived. A few wretched trees bordered a plain where the ground was hidden under the black dust of the mineral fuel, but no cinders nor even fragments of coal were to be seen.
Though, during the first years of his youth, the pick was never out of Harry's hand, nevertheless the young miner was not long in acquiring sufficient knowledge to raise him into the upper class of the miners, and he would certainly have succeeded his father as overman of the Dochart pit, if the colliery had not been abandoned.
Madge, Simon's faithful companion, his "gude-wife," to use the Scotch term, was a tall, strong, comely woman. Madge had no wish to leave the Dochart pit any more than had her husband. She shared all his hopes and regrets. She encouraged him, she urged him on, and talked to him in a way which cheered the heart of the old overman. "Aberfoyle is only asleep," she would say.
It is vexatious that all the apparatus of the mine, deserted for ten years, must be set up anew. Never mind. We have found the vein which was thought to be exhausted, and this time it shall be worked to the end!" "Well, Mr. Starr," asked Ford, "what do you think of our discovery? Was I wrong to trouble you? Are you sorry to have paid this visit to the Dochart pit?"
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