“I bet,” he said, his eyes shining, “that this thing has held gold and silver, jewels maybe!”
“Huh!” said Joe skeptically, “you’ll be finding the treasure next. You can’t tell anything by an empty bag.”
“No,” retorted Herb indignantly, “and you can’t tell anything by the rest of the stuff we’ve found here, the hammer, for instance, and the broken dishes, but you can imagine things just the same.”
“Someone used this place to hide in, that one thing’s sure,” said Bob. “But there hasn’t been anyone here recently. Whoever our friends were, they probably died a couple of hundred years ago.”
But in spite of the chaffing it remained a fact that from that day of this last discovery the boys found the lure of the cave irresistible. They spent hours there, imagining all sorts of romantic happenings in the past and bemoaning the fact that nothing exciting ever happened to them.
“Here it is getting near time for us to go home again, and never a real fire yet,” complained Herb. “That’s what I call a mean trick.”
For, although they visited the rangers every day, the latter reported everything quiet without ever a spark on the horizon and the boys began to think that the fire they had helped to quell at the railroad tracks was the only one they were destined to take part in that summer.
They had had excellent weather all along, warm, sunshiny days when the out-of-doors called to them and the only time they wanted to stay indoors at all was when the spirit moved them to work on their radio set.
But now the weather changed suddenly. One morning the boys woke to find the sky leaden and overcast. There was the feel of rain in the air and a chill breeze was blowing.
“Won’t be very cheerful around the cave to-day,” said Bob, as he stood in the doorway of the lodge, looking up at the lowering sky. “Guess we’d better stick around this cabin. I want to experiment a bit with the transmitter, anyway.”