No sound came to him, and so he again turned on the light and then pushed against the partition. To his astonishment it turned outward like a door, and his light showed him the interior of a small shed. Stepping through and closing the boards after him, he was surprised to see that it was on hinges and formed part of the wall of the small building in which he found himself. There were two windows and a door to the place, but otherwise the interior was perfectly bare. A conviction came to him.
“By George, this is the quarry shed where Kent and I saw the man with the black gloves go in! No wonder no one answered our knocks and kicks. The man had gone up the tunnel to the lodge, and when we got over that way, we saw him run into the tool house! I’m learning so much that it makes me dizzy!”
He opened the door of the quarry shed and stepped out. The wind, coming in from a break in the rock wall, had swept the snow away from the door, and the ground was hard and the snow at that particular place hard-packed. He closed the door and looked around. It was much the same as it had been the night he and Kent had stood there demanding shelter, except that the snow was not driving. He wondered where the black shadow came from, and he began to wander toward the far end of the quarry. For a while he did not use his light, and it was not until he was at the very base of the quarry wall that he flashed the light around. There was nothing to be seen.
“No house or anything down at this end,” he reflected, turning. “I’d better go the other way.”
Then his eyes fell on a figure crossing the bowl of the quarry, and instinctively he crouched down. It was the same black-clothed figure that they had seen once before, and the man went boldly into the quarry shed. Barry watched him with wildly beating heart.
“There he goes now!” he breathed. “On his way to the lodge to start something, I’ll bet! And as sure as I’m a foot high, he’ll discover that someone has been in his tunnel! Then what will happen?”
CHAPTER XXIII
The Raiders
The boys who remained in the kitchen helping Coach Jordan with the dishes were not long in finishing the job. Kent and the coach did the washing, and as fast as they turned out the dripping, steaming plates, the other boys snatched them up and dried them. There was a lot of good-natured fun about it all, and it was plainly to be seen that the boys from Cloverfield were enjoying the whole trip.
Coach Jordan kept them interested by his description of his travels and experiences, and at the time that Barry left the room on his way to the tool house he was telling of the days when he was a member of the great Fordson camp in the mountains of Kentucky. His account of the road-building and forest-ranging in the dense timber of the Southern upland was of great interest to the boys, and they laughed heartily at some of the rough experiences that he had encountered while staying in mountain log cabins and having to get up at three o’clock and shave with well water on frosty mornings. He told them of the great salt kettles rusting away in the mud of the little town that was at the time the shipping point for the Ford lumber and coal, a town which had at one time supplied all of the blue-grass state with salt. The boys listened with great attention.
“What’s the difference between those mountains and these?” Tom Bailey asked.