“There are forty-seven men missing, and the new men can sleep in their cottages.”

“That’s so,” said the Colonel, “but there are the wives and the children.  I shall send sleeping tents and eating tents, and provisions enough to feed a battalion.  Forty-seven lives,” said he, pityingly.

“Ay, sir,” said the deputy, “and such lives, some of them; for Mr. Hope and Miss Mary Bartley—­leastways that is not her name now, she’s Mr. Hope’s daughter.”

“Why, what has she to do with it?”

“I am sorry to say, sir, she is down the mine.”

“God forbid!” said the Colonel; “that noble girl dead, or in mortal danger.”

“She is, sir,” and, lowering his voice, “by foul play;” then seeing the Colonel greatly shocked and moved, he said, “and I ought not to keep it from you.  You are our nearest magistrate; the young lady told me at the pit mouth she is Mr. Hope’s daughter.”

“And so she is.”

“And she said there was a plot to destroy her father in the mine by exploding the old workings he was going to visit.  One Ben Burnley was to do it; a blackguard that has a spite against Mr. Hope for discharging him.  But there was money behind him and a villain that she described to us—­black eyebrows, a face like a corpse, and dressed in a suit of tweed one color.  We hoped that she might have been mistaken, or she might have warned Mr. Hope in time; but now it is to be seen that there was no mistake, and she had not time to warn him.  The deed is done; and a darker deed was never done, even in the dark.”

Colonel Clifford groaned:  after a while he said, “Seize that Ben Burnley at once, or he will soon leave this place behind him.”

“No, he won’t,” said the deputy.  “He is in the mine, that is one comfort; and if he comes out alive his life won’t be worth much, with the law on one side of the blackguard and Judge Lynch on t’other.”

“The first thing,” said the Colonel, “is to save these precious lives.  God help us and them.”

He then went to the Railway, and wired certain leading tradesmen in Derby for provisions, salt and fresh, on a large scale, and for new tents.  He had some old ones stored away in his own house.  He also secured abundance of knives, forks, plates, buckets, pitchers, and jugs, and, in short, he opened a commissariat.  He inquired for his son Walter, and why he was so late.  He could learn nothing but that Walter had mounted a hunter and left word with Baker that he should not be home till eight o’clock.  “John,” said the Colonel, solemnly, “I am in great trouble, and Walter is in worse, I fear.  Let nobody speak to him about this accident at the mine till he has seen me.”

* * * * *

Walter Clifford rode to the Lake Hotel to inquire after the bracelet.  The landlady told him she had sent her husband over with it that day.

“Confound it,” said Walter; “why, he won’t know who to take it to.”