He was in total darkness, and was about to get down off the chair, and grope his way back to the table, when a gleam of light, showing through a crack in the door, attracted his attention.
“Somebody is coming,” he said. “Maybe they’re going to let me out. Or, perhaps, they heard the lantern fall.”
But, as he looked, he saw that the gleam was not made by a torch or lantern being carried by someone approaching his dungeon. Instead it came from several torches stuck in the wall of the main cave.
And, by the light of these torches Fenn made an odd discovery. Several men were digging in the sides of the cavern, loosening the clay and soft rock with picks and shovels. They were piling the material in boxes which were loaded into a car, that ran on a small track, and were hurried off, to some place that the boy could not see.
As he watched he saw Dirkfell approach, and, by signs and gestures, for Fenn could not hear at that distance, the man urged the laborers to work faster.
“They’re mining,” thought Fenn. “It must be valuable stuff, too, or they wouldn’t take out such small quantities. And they must be working in secret, or they wouldn’t take all the precautions they do, to remain hidden. There’s something queer back of all this, and I’d like to see what it is.”
Fenn applied his eye closely to the crack in the door. He could see the men gathered about a cavity in the cavern wall, on which they were working, and, from the way in which they pointed at something the boy believed they must have come upon a rich deposit of whatever ore they were mining.
“I wish I was out of this place!” exclaimed Fenn to himself. “If I had the boys here to help me I’ll bet we could escape, and then there’d be a different story to tell.
“There must be an opening, somewhere,” he reasoned. “That air comes from under the door. It’s fresh, so there must be some communication directly with the outer air, from the big cave.”
He stretched out flat on his face, and put his eyes as close as he could to the bottom of the portal. He saw light beneath it, and, jumping up, exclaimed: