At the moment both were slightly stunned. Their candle flames had of course been flicked out. Then Ted reached mechanically for his matches, by whose flare he found his hat, and still firmly stuffed into the band, his candles. The light disclosed a cavern with muddy walls dripping above them, and to their right, an inky pool of water. The air was all aflutter with the bats they had startled from their pendant slumbers, lizards scuttled away in all directions, and a fish flopped in the pool, with a splash that sounded out of all proportion to its exciting cause. Ted grinned as he saw Ace first pinch himself to see if he were dreaming, then slowly feel his joints to make sure none were seriously damaged.
The fall had rather jolted his nerves, but otherwise he was unhurt, as was his chum. But how to return the way they had come they could not see, for the walls were too slippery to climb, there was not a spear of anything movable in sight on which they might gain a foot-hold, and when Ted tried it from Ace’s shoulders, the rim of the well was too slippery with mud for him to gain a hand-hold.
The bats, blind from their lightless lives, bumped against them and added the final touch of weirdness by their gnome-like faces.
With the uncanny feeling that they ought to whisper, the shaking boys started to explore the cavern, which they found led off in three directions. It must be on the same level they had left when they said good-by to Radcliffe, but in their panic they were completely turned around, and they had not explored for ten minutes before they were so confused that they could not even have found their way back to the cavern of the pool.
Now Ted had been lost before. He knew the panic feeling, the sudden sense of utter and helpless isolation, the absurd fearfulness, almost the temporary insanity of it. His scalp prickled,—as did Ace’s,—and for a little while his wits seemed befogged. Then he remembered that bed-rock advice Long Lester had once given him. When you don’t know which way to go, sit down and don’t move one step for half an hour. And try to think out the way you got there, or some plan of campaign for finding yourself again.
Ted had once been lost in the chaparral,—a thorny tangle of low growths that reached higher than his head. When he first discovered he was off the trail, he wandered about as in a mystic maze, till a shred of his own gingham shirt, (caught on a stub of manzanita), told him he had circled.
He had had to spend the night there, but in the end he had stumbled upon the trail again, not ten feet from where he lost it.
As Long Lester afterwards pointed out, had he but blazed his trail from the very first step, he could at least have back-tracked. Or better, if he had with his jack-knife made a blaze sufficiently high on some stunted tree to have seen it and come back to it, he might have circled, and in ever widening circles would surely, in time, have found the trail.
Or, again, he might have—had he known—at least hacked a straight course by the stars, (always provided that he knew in which direction lay the way out).
“Ace,” he managed to steady his voice when they had been seated on a dry ledge for some little time, “your knowledge of cave formations might help us to find the way out of here. Gee! If this was only in the woods, or even on some mountain side above the clouds! But it’s up to you now.”