“I wish we had another candle,” said he. “I’d like to stay here long enough to see what this is. It looks like a small vein of galena.”
“Never mind that now!” Dick exclaimed. “We can come back again, if we want to. We mustn’t leave our traps alone another minute!”
Hurrying as well as they could over the broken stone floor of the crevice, and stumbling now and again into the small torrent that was coursing through it, they won back to the daylight crack and climbed out. Their alarm had been needless. The jacks were grazing peacefully in the ravine, and the camp dunnage was lying just as they had left it.
Dick laughed rather shamefacedly.
“What is there about an underground job to make a fellow get panicky all in a minute?” he asked. “When you mentioned what might happen up here while we were all down yonder in that cellar, I could just see those three crooks digging out through the woods with every last thing we had in the world.”
“Umph!” said the practical-minded Larry. “Great thing to have a vivid imagination. Got enough of the exploring, or do you want to go back?”
“I’d like to go back,” Purdick asserted. “I more than half believe that I found a vein of mineral just as you fellows turned in the fire alarm.”
Larry was looking down at the rude flight of natural steps up which they had just clambered in getting out of the crevice.
“If you fellows think it’s worth while, I believe we can get the jacks down there,” he suggested. “If we do that, we can carry the dunnage down and load the jacks in the cave.”