“That looks very much like the place where the cougar was waiting for me, but I didn't think there were enough in this country to furnish one for every bush.”
He reconnoitered it for several minutes, but finally ventured upon a closer acquaintance. There certainly was no wild animal there, and he stooped down and began crawling toward the centre.
He was near the middle when he was alarmed at finding the ground giving way beneath him. It was sinking rapidly downward, and he clutched desperately at the bushes to save himself, but those that he grasped yielded and went, too.
In his terror and despair he cried out, and fought like a madman to save himself; but there was nothing firm or substantial upon which he could lay hold, and he was helpless to check his descent.
Down, down, down he went in the pulseless darkness, lower and lower, until he found himself going through the dizzying air—to where?
CHAPTER XXV. WITHIN THE EARTH
It was like a terrible dream, and, for an instant or more, during which Fred Munson was descending through the gloom and darkness, he believed it was such indeed; but he was quickly recalled from his error by his arrival at the end of his journey. The truth was that the boy, in crawling beneath the clump of bushes for shelter, would have crawled head first into the mouth of the cave, but for the fact that the ground immediately surrounding the opening gave way beneath his weight before he reached it.
His fall was not very far, and when he struck the ground, it was so soft and yielding that he was scarcely conscious of a jar; but the nervous shock was so great that, for a few minutes, he believed that he was fatally injured.
When he was able to recall his scattered senses, he looked around him in the hope of gaining some idea of where he was; but he quickly saw that he was in a place where his eyes were of no service. The darkness was as impenetrable as that which plagued Pharoah and his Egyptians. Only when he looked upward was the blackness of darkness relieved. Enough straggling rays worked their way through the bushes to give the opening a dim, misty appearance, such as is sometimes observed when that orb is rising in a cloud of fog and vapor; but in every other direction he might as well have been blind, for all the good his eyes did him.