'Yes,' cried Harry, 'here we are! Let's have the hammer, Peterson.'

Harry broke away projecting pieces of stone, widening the aperture, and
Dick and the detective joined them at the opening.

'I'll go first,' said the boy. 'I can go down the ladder we made, but it
mightn't bear a man.'

Dick went below and lit a couple of candles. Nothing had been touched in
the drive, and he peeped into the shaft and saw that the loose dirt there
was as he left it. Harry joined him in a few minutes and McKnight
followed. The men came down on the boys' curious ladder, but with a rope
about their waists, paid out from above. Downy was the last to go below,
Peterson remaining on the surface to keep the crowd back from the
entrance.

McKnight seized a candle, crawled to the extremity of Dick's diminishing
drive, and examined the place curiously.

'It's right,' he cried, 'right as the bank. She's a dyke formation, I
should say, an' rich. By the holy, we're made men--made men, Hardy!

Detective Downy was too deeply interested in his own quest to pay much
attention to the miners.

'Now, my lad,' he said, 'where are we?'

'The bag's there under them lumps.' Dick held his candle low, throwing
its light into the shaft. Downy dropped from the slabs placed across from