boulders.  Waddy venerated the old Red Hand as something so ancient that its history left openings for untrammelled conjecture, and the boys associated it with not a few of the mysteries of those grand far-off ages when dragons abducted beautiful maidens and giants were quite common outside circuses.  The mouth of the shaft was covered with substantial timbers, save for a small iron-barred door securely padlocked.  The pit now served a useful purpose as air-shaft for the Silver Stream, and the iron-runged ladders still ran down into its black depths.

The boys kept to the timber, and presently found themselves climbing down the rugged rocks where the hillside suddenly became an abrupt wall.  From here had been blasted the thousands of tons of rock that went to the building of that grim prison in Yarraman, the town where Frank Hardy lay, a good half-day’s tramp across the wide flat country faced by the township The quarry, too, was overgrown again; being almost inaccessible to Wilson’s cattle its undergrowth was rank and high, and as it was sheltered from the sun’s rays and watered in part by a tiny spring, it was often the one green oasis in a weary land of crackling yellow and drab.

After gaining the bottom of the quarry, Jacker led the way to the deepest end.  Here the bottom, covered with scrub growth, sloped rather suddenly for a few feet up to the abrupt wall.  Going on his hands and knees under the thick odorous peppermint saplings, Jacker ran his head into a niche in the rock amongst climbing sarsaparilla, and remained so, like some strange geological specimen half embedded in the rock.  Within, where his head was hidden, the darkness was impenetrable.  Jacker blew a strange note on a whistle manufactured from the nut of an apricot, and after a few moments a light appeared below him, a feeble flame, far down in the rock.  This was waved twice and then withdrawn.

‘Righto!’ said Jacker in a hoarse piratical tone.  ’Gimme the tucker, Black Douglas; I’ll go down.  You coves keep watch, an’ no talkin’, mind.’

Phil grumbled inarticulately, and Jacker’s tone became hoarser and more piratical still.

‘Who’s commandin’ here?’ he growled.  ’D’ye mean mutiny?

‘Oh, shut up!’ said Doon, bitterly.  ‘No one’s goin’ t’ mutiny, but there ain’t no fun campin’ here.’

McKnight relented.

‘All right,’ he said, ’come down if you wanter.  S’pose you’ll on’y be makin’ some kind of a row ‘f I leave you.’

Jacker put the growth aside carefully, and going feet first gradually disappeared.  Within there in the formless darkness he stood upon a ladder made of the long stem of a sapling to which cleats were nailed.  The sapling was suspended in a black abyss.  The boy, with his bundle hanging from his shoulder, started down fearlessly.  Presently he came to where a second prop was fastened to the first with spikes and strong rope.  Here he paused a moment, and called: