“All right; I’ll go, that is, if I can find the way.”
“Why, don’t you think you can lead the way back over the same route you came?”
An anxious expression came over the boy’s face as he asked the question.
“I don’t know for sure. I came in such a hurry, being pursued by a human sleuthhound as I was. But I ought to be able to find the way without much trouble. Anyhow, we will try. If I can’t, probably Jupiter can. Come—we may as well start at once.”
But here an unforeseen obstacle presented itself.
The opening of this passage, which ran upward in a steep ascent, was very small—not over four feet in diameter.
They had not gone into this more than a dozen feet before they came to a halt, and saw that they could go no further.
A monster bowlder of iron stone had slipped or been pushed into the passage from above, and it would have taken at least a score of men to remove it.
“Some of my hated enemy’s work,” said Lacy, as he played with his beard nervously. “This is as far as he followed me. He must have pushed this bowlder from above and then went back and fallen into the stream. Well, we must find some other way of getting out, or else we can stay here in this wonderful underground place and starve!”