“Steve’s wise not to go there, then. But it’s different at my place.”
No more was said. Marion looked often at him as they journeyed on, and her face was troubled. He kept his forward-ranging gaze on the vague path.
After a time he found himself emerging at the brink. Here she resumed the lead. Down over a jagged confusion of leaning bowlders she picked a tortuous way, followed by the more slowly moving man. Presently they were under the cliff, amid thick brush, on steep but firm-soiled ground whence protruded a few deep-sunk blocks. She moved a rod or two to the left and paused.
“See anything?” she questioned.
He studied the surroundings and shook his head. In the blank face of the precipice showed no opening—not even a crack. The cliff, the ground, the brush, the half dozen juts of gray stone—there was no sign of a hiding-place. True, there were two fair-sized bowlder-tops close together, with a small black hole between; but the hole must be only a cranny in the earth, like hundreds of others along the wall—a good place to break a leg, but not to hide in. He did not give it a second glance.
Yet it was at this despised hole that she knelt. Into it her head vanished, and from it sounded her signal—a soft “Hoo-hoo” almost inaudible above ground. From somewhere down in the bowels of the tightly packed earth floated a faint sound in reply. Her head reappeared.
“I’ll go down first to tell him it’s all right,” she murmured. “You wait ’bout two minutes or so, then come ’long. It’ll be tight squeezin’—you’re so wide acrost the shoulders—but you can git through.”
She pushed the apron-package into the hole. Then she turned once more to him.
“This here is my little secret, that I’ve come to for years,” she told him. “There ain’t anybody ever been into it but me—and Steve. The place Uncle Eb took Steve to wasn’t so good—it was too easy to find—so I brought him here.”
With that she was gone into the gloomy opening.