“Let’s try to make the boys hear and tell ’em to haul us back,” suggested Ned.
Raising their voices in a combined effort, they sent a shout reverberating up the tunnel, and an answering halloo came faintly to their ears.
“Here’s where Weary does his stuff!” grinned Dick, as he watched the cable drag slowly out of the water like a great black snake. “He’ll crab a plenty over this night’s hard labor!”
Soon the car came into view, looking not unlike some huge amphibian as it emerged from the pool streaming water at every angle. Climbing upon it as it passed, Ned and Dick were pulled up the steep incline, till at length they came in sight of their comrades grunting at the crank-handle of the winch.
“Well, what did you find?” puffed Beals, as the car came to rest in its original position.
“Nothing much,” replied Dick.
“Nothing much!” groaned Wilbur. “And that’s the fruit of the hardest labor a man was ever sentenced to! Say, you let me ride down and back a couple of times while you fellows grind that winch!”
“We didn’t find much because there’s nothing down there except water,” explained Ned, “but we’ve got an idea as to what’s pulling on that small cable,” and Ned proceeded to give his theory of the buoy which he and Dick had seen appear and disappear at the surface of the lake.
“Sounds reasonable,” admitted Charlie Rogers. “If anybody outside wanted to get an absolutely exact location of the submerged end of this mine, why that buoy would do the trick for ’em; but what the blazes could anybody want of it, and why so fussy to be within inches?”
“That’s the puzzle,” agreed Ned. “That’s what we got to find out. Slade hinted that if we got inside the cellar we’d soon learn the whole game. So far we haven’t accomplished much. Let’s look around up at this end of the mine.”