"I don't know," she flung over her shoulder, with a flurry of sand. "I don't know for sure, but I think the boys are buried in this."
That roused Margy and Jess to action, and they began, too, to dig. A few feet behind the mound there was an upheaval and Fred's face and shoulders came into view. Polly never stopped digging, though Jess and Margy paused and stared.
"I've got Ward," sputtered Fred, and he pulled the younger boy up beside him.
Then they all rushed to Polly, who had uncovered the sturdy legs in their brown socks that belonged to Artie. A frenzied and concerted effort uncovered the whole boy in less time than it takes to tell it—a purple-faced Artie who was several minutes recovering his breath, but who was all right as soon as he found he could breathe.
"Gee," said Fred, "I never thought the thing would bust in like that!"
"I couldn't tell what hit us," Ward observed, trying to rub the sand out of his hair.
"You didn't see our cave, did you, Polly?" asked Artie, apparently unaware that he had been nearly suffocated.
"Is that a cave?" Margy's tone was scornful. "Is that what you've been doing all this time? It didn't look like much."
"That's because you didn't see the inside," said Fred. "You could almost stand up in the main room, and we had a lot of tunnels and passages we were building."
"It was great," and Artie nodded. "We were going to have the largest cave any one ever made at Sunrise Beach."