“That is a good idea and we will follow it out. Now let us lie down here and spend the night and start early in the morning before the sun gets too hot.”
Ten minutes later they were both asleep with Stubby curled up under Billy’s nose. He always got as close to him as possible for company.
It took our travelers several days to reach the volcano and its summit, and those days were days of hardships, with little to eat or drink, and both were looking tired and thin when we met them again within a few feet of the opening of the crater.
“Billy, I think sight-seeing is pretty hard work, especially when you have to walk all the way and nearly die of thirst and hunger. These hot cinders and hardened lava are burning and cutting my feet all to pieces and I wish I had hoofs like yours.”
“Well, if you wish you had my hoofs, I wish I had your short hair, for I am almost suffocated with my long coat, besides the air in this altitude is hard to breathe. One gets out of breath so easily and feels as if there was nothing to the air. Phew! what’s that terrible odor? It smells as if a whole factory of sulphur matches had gone off at once. Hark! What is that rumbling noise? It sounds like thunder, but it can’t be that for the sky is without a cloud and is as blue as blue can be. Say, Stubby, did you feel the earth shake then? If we were down on the level I should think it were an earthquake. Gracious! did you hear that explosion and feel the earth shake again? We had better get out of this.”
Just then the smoke rolled away for a minute and they saw they were within a few feet of the top so they decided they would not give up, bad as the sulphur and smoke were, until they had taken one peep into the crater.
This one peep nearly cost Stubby his life, for just as he had crawled to the very brink and was looking down, down, down into the very bowels of the earth where lava was boiling and steam hissing, an extra whiff of sulphur arose from the boiling, seething mass below which choked and strangled him so he could not move.
Billy had jumped back barely in time to escape it and was just starting on a run down the cone away from this dangerous place when he heard a little whine and saw Stubby drop over on his side as if dead. With a bound Billy was back, and grabbing him by the nape of his neck, as a cat carries her kittens, he carried him down the volcano’s side to safety.
It took Stubby a long while to come to and when he did so he found his poor little torn and bleeding feet as well as his nose resting in the cool sands of a little stream, and all he had to do, if he wanted a drink, was to stick out his tongue and let the water run through his mouth.