Instinctively he looked about him, as though he would find it hanging on one of the prongs of the tree-trunk ladder, which might answer as a hat rack. Then he laughed at himself.
“I remember now,” he said. “It flew off when I fell through that clump of fern into the hole I thought led to China. Guess I’ll have to make my bow without my hat.”
He glanced below him. It seemed as if he was at the last of the ventilating openings for, further down, there were no glimmerings of daylight, which was fast waning. Then, as he looked, he caught the flickering of a torch, not far down. It waved to and fro, casting queer shadows on the walls of the shaft, and then the person holding it seemed coming up the ladder.
“Now there’s going to be trouble,” thought Fenn. “We can’t pass on this thing. Either he’s got to wait until I get down, or I’ll have to go all the way back to the top. I wonder if I better yell to let him know I’m here? No, that wouldn’t be just the thing. I’ll try to slip around between the wall and the ladder, and, maybe, he’ll pass me.”
Fenn proceeded to put this rather risky plan into operation. Holding on by both hands to one of the projecting branches he endeavored to swing himself around. The man with the torch was coming nearer and nearer.
Suddenly Fenn’s hold slipped. He tried to recover himself but without avail. The next moment his hands lost their grip and he went plunging down into the darkness below, faintly illuminated by the smoking torch. Then he knew no more.
When Fenn came to his senses it was only with the utmost difficulty that he could recall what had happened. He had a hazy recollection of having been in some dark hole—then a light was seen—then he slipped—then came blackness and then—
He tried to raise himself from where he lay, and a rustling told him he was reclining on a bed of straw. By the light of a torch stuck in the earthen wall of what seemed to be a cavern, Fenn could make out the shadows of several men, grotesquely large and misshapen, moving about. From the distance came a peculiar noise, as of machinery.
Fenn’s brain cleared slowly, though from the ache in his head, he knew he must have had quite a fall. He raised himself on his elbow, and gradually came to a sitting position. He drew a long breath, and started to get up.
As he did so, he felt some one place his hands on his chest, and push him back, not rudely, but with enough firmness to indicate that he was to lie down. Instinctively he struggled against what seemed to him a dim shape in the half-darkness.