“It is not worth while,” exclaimed Miranda impatiently, adding not over lucidly, “they take them away.”
“Perhaps Mr. Arthur wore sandals,” suggested Andrew, illuminated by a brilliant idea.
“Whatever happened, Uncle Harold,” said Una, who had ventured into the tunnel some distance ahead of the others, “what difference does it make now? We are losing time from our search—from your picnic, Mrs. Quayle!”
“Picnic!” she shuddered. “How can we picnic with dead walls and mysterious footprints all around us?”
“Good!” exclaimed Miranda in response to Una’s appeal. “The womens always are captains—the mens must follow!”
There being no objection to this way of putting it, Leighton and Raoul gave up the puzzle of the footprints and set out seriously to explore the tunnel.
They soon found, as Raoul said, that traveling here had its difficulties. Huge boulders that took some little dexterity and sureness of foot to get over obstructed the narrow passage. For Una, who showed surprising agility, such impediments were not disconcerting; but Mrs. Quayle found them not at all to her liking. Progress with that bewildered lady was necessarily slow and, in some unusually rough places, had to be made by a system of shoving from behind and hauling from above that kept her in a state of breathless agitation. This was increased by imaginary terrors, chief among which was the constant dread of meeting the apparition described by Andrew, whose story had made a deep impression on her mind.
As a matter of fact Andrew’s man in the toga was not in evidence, except as the occasional imprint of a sandal on the floor of the cave suggested him. But the explorers were too busy surmounting the obstacles with which the tunnel was strewn to heed details that otherwise might have arrested their attention. The sharp edges of the rocky wall played havoc with their clothing, drawing from Miranda, incensed at his own rotundity, a choice series of expletives—fortunately in Spanish—and arousing the wrath even of Mrs. Quayle. After the first five hundred yards, however, the passage widened sufficiently for them to look about and take account of the perils—if there were any—facing them.
The endless vista of rock, hewn in every conceivable shape and lighted dimly by the rays from their lamps, was dispiriting, to say the least. With the passing of the tunnel, however, and its alarming sense of premature entombment, even Mrs. Quayle experienced a faint return of confidence, while the schoolmaster, her companion in misery, began to feel a mild curiosity in the outcome of an adventure for the undertaking of which he had been the unwilling cause. He wondered vaguely to what further depths of this hole in the mountain the more enterprising spirits of the party would lead them.