“Jack! We can hear voices. Is everything all right?”
“So far, Mike,” said Jack. “They are all hunting hard - but the only thing they seem to have found is a few footmarks round the spring. I’ll stay here for a bit and see what I can hear.”
The hunt went on. Nothing seemed to be found. The children had cleared everything up very well indeed.
But, as Jack sat just inside the cave, there came a shout from someone near the beach.
“Just look here! What do you make of this?”
Jack wondered whatever the man had found. He soon knew. The man had kicked aside the heather that had hidden the hen-yard - and had found the newly scattered sand!
“This looks as if something had been going on here,” said the man. “But goodness knows what! You know, I think those children are here somewhere. It’s up to us to find them. Clever little things, too, they must be, hiding away all traces of themselves like this!”
“We’d better beat through the bushes and the bracken,” said another man. “They may be hiding there. That’d be the likeliest place.”
Then Jack heard the men beating through the bracken, poking into every bush, trying their hardest to find a hidden child. But not one could they find.
Jack crawled back to the cave after two or three hours and told the others what had happened. They listened, alarmed to hear that the hen-yard had been discovered even though they had tried so hard to hide it.