“And take ’em with us?” Dick said.
“Why, yes, as far as we go—or as long as the going is possible for them. Why not?”
“There isn’t any ‘why not,’” Dick broke out, with a swift return of the exploring enthusiasm; and he and Purdick went to catch the burros.
But after the little beasts had been brought to the head of the precipitous stairway, the old adage, that one man can lead a horse to water, but twenty can’t make him drink, seemed to apply to donkeys as well as to horses. Fishbait shied and braced himself like the end man on a tug-of-war rope, and Lop-Ear, taking the cue from his file leader, did the same.
Now there certainly wasn’t, or wouldn’t appear to be, any sufficient reason for going to any great amount of trouble to get the burros down into the cave; but human beings are curious creatures, in a good many ways. Realizing fully that, in all probability, the game wasn’t at all worth the candle, the three set their heads determinedly upon getting the pack animals underground, and the more the jacks held back, the more determined they became. So, after a good deal of pulling and hauling and pushing and heaving, the little pack animals were finally got down to the comparatively level floor of the crevice, the packs—less cumbersome now because the provisions were running low—were adjusted, a couple of candles were lighted, and once more the exploring expedition—which had now become a caravan—moved forward.
Once in the depths, the burros gave no more trouble; indeed, as Dick remarked, they trudged along much as if they had been reared as mine mules. Reaching their “farthest north” of the previous exploration, they stopped long enough to let Purdick examine his galena find, which turned out to be, not galena, but a small pocket of pyrites not worth bothering with.
Beyond this point the slit in the rock narrowed again, and became quite tortuous in its course; so narrow and so crooked in places that they had some trouble in getting the loaded jacks through. The torrenting stream which had been underfoot in the first few hundred yards had now taken to disappearing and reappearing, dodging underground and then coming out again to flow for a time through a channel in the floor of the cavern. The roof of the natural tunnel, ten or twelve feet high where they had entered it, now came down in some places so low that they could reach up and touch it with their hands; touch it, and also see what it was made of.
“I don’t much like the looks of this stuff overhead,” Larry said, holding his candle up to light the low-hanging roof. “You can see what it is: nothing but loose rocks and forest rubbish that has been blown or washed in from the surface. If it should take a notion to fall down and plug this runway, we’d be strictly out of the fight.”
“You said something then,” said Dick. “Here’s hoping she doesn’t take the notion—not while we’re in here, anyway.”
Now this was a good hope, but in making it Dick failed to put enough staying power in it. At one of the tightest places in the narrow passage, where the walls were pinched together and the roof was hardly man-head high, Dick, who was tail-ender in the procession of three and was leading Lop-Ear, was brought up standing by a sudden pull on the halter from behind.