“I wonder how far in it goes?” he queried.
There was no particular reason why they shouldn’t take a few minutes in which to find out how far in it went, so they ducked in under the rotting timbers.
The tunnel dipped down sharply from the entrance, as if its excavator had been following an erratic mineral lead of some sort, and it presently passed from red clay into rock. Then, suddenly, the man-made part of it stopped short, and in the dim light filtering down from the entrance they found themselves in what appeared to be a cavern of tremendous extent; at least, in the semi-darkness they could not distinguish its boundaries.
“Great Jehu!” Dick exclaimed, and his voice came back to him in a hollow echo, “the—the Old Man of the Mountain’s got a hole in his insides!”
“And some hole, at that,” Larry agreed, and he struck a match.
The tiny flame did next to nothing in the way of dispelling the darkness in the great chamber, but it did serve to show them how the unknown prospector’s final round of blasts had broken through into the cavern.
“And I’ll bet he was just about as much astonished as we were just now,” was Dick’s comment. Then he said, “’Sh!—listen!”
What they heard was the steady drip-drip-drip of water. And now they noticed that there was a dank smell in the place, like that of a wet cellar.
“Say, Larry,” Dick went on, “I’d like to know a little more about this place. Let’s go back to what there is left of our camp and see if we can’t find a candle.”