"This is a very glorious adventure. It is, isn't it?" inquired the Dentist in breathlessness, when the young stomachs of the young explorers had bitten the dust for some yards further.
"Yes," said Oswald, encouraging the boy, "and it's your find, too," he added, with admirable fairness and justice, unusual in one so young. "I only hope we shan't find a mouldering skeleton buried alive behind that door when we get to it. Come on. What are you stopping for now?" he added kindly.
"It's—it's only cobwebs in my throat," Denny remarked, and he came on, though slower than before.
Oswald, with his customary intrepid caution, was leading the way, and he paused every now and then to strike a match because it was pitch dark, and at any moment the courageous leader might have tumbled into a well or a dungeon, or knocked his dauntless nose against something in the dark.
"It's all right for you," he said to Denny, when he had happened to kick his follower in the eye. "You've nothing to fear except my boots, and whatever they do is accidental, and so it doesn't count, but I may be going straight into some trap that has been yawning for me for countless ages."
"I won't come on so fast, thank you," said the Dentist. "I don't think you've kicked my eye out yet."
So they went on and on, crampedly crawling on what I have mentioned before, and at last Oswald did not strike the next match carefully enough, and with the suddenness of a falling star his hands, which, with his knees, he was crawling on, went over the edge into infinite space, and his chest alone, catching sharply on the edge of the precipice, saved him from being hurled to the bottom of it.
"Halt!" he cried, as soon as he had any breath again. But, alas! it was too late! The Dentist's nose had been too rapid, and had caught up the boot-heel of the daring leader. This was very annoying to Oswald, and was not in the least his fault.
"Do keep your nose off my boots half a sec.," he remarked, but not crossly. "I'll strike a match."
And he did, and by its weird and unscrutatious light looked down into the precipice.