He marched beside Brick and Ugly Brown, the young, snub-nosed lad whose blunt, sun-burnt face was somewhat likable in its very ugliness. He remembered that these two, with Kipper Dabney, had hazed him one moonlight night—long ago, it seemed—but he made no mention to them of that night when he had leaped, blindfolded, over Indian Cliff.
“What’s this Glen like that we’re heading for, Ugly?” Dirk asked.
“Ain’t you ever been there? Say, it’s a swell place. We hike over here lots of times. Whillikers, I’m ready for a swim there right now, even if the water feels as if it had just melted from snow. It’s called Pot-Hole Glen because down below, the water has run across the rocks so fast that there are a bunch of deep, smooth holes worn down by pebbles whirlin’ around—right through solid rock. It used to be an old Indian camping place, I’ve heard. We’ll be there soon, right after we cut across the fields over yonder.”
At that moment Mr. Carrigan turned off the dusty road and cut through a meadow where a herd of white-faced cows grazed. Dirk climbed the rail fence slowly, for he was hot and more than a little tired by the march; but he joined in the whoops of his companions as they raced the short distance that separated them from the goal of their noonday pause and the swim that was to come. And thus Dirk Van Horn came to Pot-Hole Glen, which he was never in his life to remember without a chill of horror creeping up his spine—the horror of strangling death.
CHAPTER XIV
THE WATCHER AGAIN
The little plateau above the Glen was a pleasant place enough—a smooth, shadowy stretch of greensward marked here and there with the remains of more than one Lenape campfire. Here the trailers paused only long enough to cast off their blanket-packs, and then raced in a body for the steep, twining path leading down the wall carved out in past ages by the running stream at its foot.
“Now for a swim!” was the cry as, helter-skelter, the boys scrambled down the path that zigzagged through the underbrush.
Dirk paused at the bottom of the cleft, and falling slightly behind the others, searched for the pot-holes that Ugly Brown had described. There they were—smooth shafts of varying widths, sunken into the rocky floor over which the stream trickled softly. Taking a stick, Dirk probed one of them, and found at the bottom a few water-worn stones whose action had drilled, in the course of many decades, a deep hole in solid granite.
“The biggest hole of all is under the falls,” Brick Ryan shouted from below him. “Come on, my son—all the other guys are gettin’ wet already!”
He disappeared from sight at a turn in the path leading down-stream, from whence Dirk could hear the boisterous shouts of his comrades rising above the splashing roar of falling water. None the less, he did not hasten, for the wonders of the Glen were too many to be hastily passed over.