In the spring of 1839 a large female panther is said to have been trapped there, and an end made of her young family. Several bears, too, had been surprised inside the Den, for the place presented great attractions as a secure retreat from winter cold. But the story that most interested us was a tradition that somewhere in the recesses of the cave the notorious Androscoggin Indian Adwanko had hidden a bag of silver money that he had received from the French for the scalps of white settlers.
The entrance to the cave fronts the pond near the foot of a precipitous mountain, called the Fall-off. A wilder locality, or one of more sinister aspect, can hardly be imagined. The cave is not spacious within; it is merely a dark hole among great granite rocks. By means of a lantern or torch you can penetrate to a distance of seventy feet or more.
One day when three of us boys had gone to Overset Pond to fish for trout we plucked up our courage and crawled into it. We crept along for what seemed to us a great distance till we found the passage obstructed by a rock that had apparently fallen from overhead. We could move the stone a little, but we did not dare to tamper with it much, for fear that other stones from above would fall. We believed that Adwanko's bag of silver was surely in some recess beyond the rock and at once began to lay plans for blasting out the stone with powder. By using a long fuse, the person that fired the charge would have time to get out before the explosion.
Our party drove there in five double-seated wagons as far as Moose-Yard Brook, where we left the teams and walked the remaining two miles through the woods to Overset Pond. Besides five of us from the old Squire's, there were our two young neighbors, Thomas and Catherine Edwards, Willis Murch and his older brother, Ben, the two Darnley boys, Newman and Rufus, their sister, Adriana, and ten or twelve other young people.
Besides luncheon baskets and materials to make lemonade, we had taken along axes, two crowbars, two lanterns, four pounds of blasting powder and three feet of safety fuse. My cousin Addison had also brought a hammer, drill and "spoon." The girls were chiefly interested in the picnic; but we boys were resolved to see what was in the depths of the cave, and immediately on reaching the place several of us lighted the lanterns and went in.
At no place could we stand upright. Apparently some animal had wintered there, for the interior had a rank odor; but we crawled on over rocks until we came to the obstructing stone sixty or seventy feet from the entrance.
We had planned to drill a hole in the rock, blast it into pieces, and thus clear a passage to what lay beyond it. On closer inspection, however, we found that it was almost impossible to set the drill and deal blows with the hammer. But the stone rested on another rock, and we believed that we could push powder in beneath it and so get an upward blast that would heave the stone either forward or backward, or perhaps even break it in halves. We therefore set to work, thrusting the powder far under the stone with a blunt stick, until we had a charge of about four pounds. When we had connected the fuse we heaped sand about the base of the stone, to confine the powder.
The blast was finally ready; and then the question who should fire it arose. The three feet of fuse would, we believed, give two full minutes for whoever lighted it to get out of the Den; but fuse sometimes burns faster than is expected, and the safety fuse made in those days was not so uniform in quality as that of present times. At first no one seemed greatly to desire the honor of touching it off. The boys stood and joked one another about it, while the girls looked on from a safe distance.
"I shan't feel offended if any one gets ahead of me," Addison remarked carelessly.
"I'd just as soon have some one else do it," Ben said, smiling.