"It looks as though there'd been an earthquake, doesn't it?" giggled Jess.
All the tunnels and passages the boys had labored so faithfully to dig had caved in, together with the mound which had been the roof of the main room. As Jess said, the depressions did look as though an earthquake, or some such havoc-maker, had visited that section of beach.
"Well, I don't think you'd better build any more caves," Polly said, with decision. "It isn't safe. Artie might have choked before we dug him out."
"You mean, you dug him out," Fred declared. "You're the one who had your wits about you, Polly. What made you think we were in the cave?"
"I wasn't sure," admitted Polly. "But when the sand began to break down, I thought 'maybe the boys are under it somewhere,' and if you were, I knew the only thing to do was to dig you up."
"We figured out it was wet enough to pack and make firm walls," Fred explained. "But I guess it wasn't. Of course, if we had had boards we could have fixed up a good cave—shored it up as they do in mines, you know."
"Come on and let's go swimming," suggested Margy, anxious to get away from the talk of cave-building.
The boys, too, had had quite enough of their secret, and they abandoned the scene of their labors without a protest. When the three mothers heard what had happened, they declared that no more sand caves were to be thought of, as long as they remained at Sunrise Beach.
Artie and Ward went over for the mail that afternoon, and when they returned they were filled with news of a carnival that had come to the edge of the town and set up its tents on the vacant lots bordering the village limits.