“I am afraid they are shut in, Art,” said Blaisdell seriously.
“Who would have thought of that?” cried Harry, going forward and looking into the gully. “Certainly Jack did not, or he would not have gone in there.”
Blaisdell and three or four others stepped to the brink of the gully, and looked down, as the dust began to settle.
“It’s closed up all right,” said Billy Manners, covering the aperture of his pinhole camera.
“Do you mean the mouth of the cave or your picture box?” asked Blaisdell. “You are a funny fellow, Billy.”
“Both,” said Billy tersely.
“I guess it is as far as the cave goes,” remarked Jasper Sawyer. “Now the question is how are we going to get the boys out?”
“H’m! we’ve got to take away that stuff, I suppose,” said Harry. “It won’t be so hard getting down there, but there’s a lot of stuff to get rid of. Come on, boys, get down there and set to work.”
“My! but there’s a lot of this stuff!” exclaimed Sawyer, getting to work. “I wonder if we can get rid of it before the boys get back? Do you suppose they heard the noise and knew what it was?”
“How would they know?” asked Arthur, throwing aside a lot of stones and earth. “The place is probably pretty big, or they would have been back by this time.”