“That’s right!” Tinny answered. “Poor Ned!” All their hearts were heavy with fear.
Bob and the mine foreman pulled back their horses when they saw Tinny and Jerry dismounting.
“We’d better go up there—the edge of the place where Ned went over—on foot,” said Jerry.
With the downpour of rain, the fierceness of the lightning and the terrific force of the thunder seemed to be lessened. It was as though the flashes and explosions had torn a hole in the sky to let the flood down, and, having accomplished this, the electricity was held in abeyance for a time. But in an instant all of them were drenched, so torrential was the fall of rain.
“Hold the horses, Bob, while we go forward and look,” suggested Tinny, handing the reins of his animal to the stout lad, while Jerry did the same with Cromley.
Cautiously the two made their way down the rain-drenched trail to the spot where Ned had last been seen. But in the fast-gathering blackness they saw no cavern, no hole where the road had dropped away or where it had been covered in a landslide. And the theory of a landslide lost its plausibility when they recalled that they had heard no sound of shifting rocks and trees.
Before them, winding its way down Thunder Mountain, was the trail, in as good shape as that part which lay behind them, and over which they had traveled since finding the old miner.
“What in the world happened?” murmured Jerry, in somewhat of a daze. “Where did Ned disappear to?”
Tinny was about to answer that he did not know, or, at best, knew only as much as Jerry could gather from what they saw, when above the roar of the storm a voice suddenly hailed them.