Then his eyes fell on the pile of empty paraffine papers on the small box lying at one side of the chamber, and the truth dawned on Fatty. Fatty, empty and hungry, the lunchless Fatty had pressed through the tight fit of the stone crevice. The well-fed Fatty, augmented by that most ample and filling lunch, had attained a girth just too much.
Physiology never had interested Fatty. And now he wondered with a chill of apprehension how long it would take him to shrink to his old dimensions. Perhaps it would take days. If, thought the worried one, if food, good food went to feed and build up the tissues as the physical culture teacher said, it might be a day or two before he was starved down to the size he had been before that generous meal!
He sat down on the box and gave himself up to dismal reflections. A day or two! In the meantime what might happen to him? Then he smiled. Of course the fellows would come and look for him. All he had to do was to lounge around and wait until they came to look for him. He knew Skinny! Skinny would stay with him. The thought of Skinny, who would not trouble his mother and so took a single cake of sweet chocolate, made Fatty vaguely uncomfortable. He had no watch, and the time passed on leaden wings. He hung a handkerchief on one of the spits of rock, and thought perhaps it would guide his rescuers. Just how they would proceed to rescue him Fatty didn’t know; couldn’t imagine. Fatty knew that no human agency could get him through that crevice after his own frenzied efforts had failed. All they could do would be to come inside and wait for him to shrink.
He commenced to look around. Opposite the opening was another narrow opening into a black, forbidding space. Fatty approached and leaning in, turned his dim flashlight cautiously around the walls. It was a large, long chamber. He could not see the end, and as he commenced to wonder if by chance there might be wild animals lurking inside, he withdrew and stationed himself by the outside slit.
At least human beings had been there before him. There were the two flat boxes lying almost hidden by a pile of rocks. He went up and looked them over. They were empty. As Fatty hauled them over something glistened on the ground beneath and he picked up a small cylinder made of brass and closed at either end. It was a neatly made, pretty toy and Fatty felt in his pocket for a knife, but he had none. Knives always dug into him. He picked with his fingers at the seam but it did not give. Fatty wanted it for a pencil case. It would hold about four pencils. So he slipped it into his pocket to show Skinny, and carefully buttoned the flap.
It was a nice, shiny brass case, and Fatty thought he could swap it some day for an ice-cream cone or a stick of fruiteena gum.
There was nothing else to look at, and Fatty kicked the boxes back where he had found them. He looked at them several times in a vague way. He was conscious that he had seen them before, but as he thought it must have been in some grocery, with figs or something of the sort in them, he gave it up. It made him somehow uncomfortable. Oh, Fatty, Fatty Bascom! What a pity you did not remember that top box! What a shame that you never trained your eyes to remember what they saw! How much trouble it would have saved!
There was some sand over by the “door” as our poor prisoner called the opening, and there Fatty sat down and waited for the diminishing process to continue.
While he sat there an airplane went humming overhead, and then for awhile there was silence; a silence only broken by the sound of rock crumbling in the inner chamber. Fatty thought of wildcats, and his scalp crept. It worked on him so that he gave up watching for someone, some mountaineer to go past on the narrow mountain trail, and fastened his eyes on the door that led into the mountain. The airplane returned and after awhile went over again. Fatty decided that it was Ernest taking the boys up for a flight. He tried the door for the twentieth hopeless time.
The silence was dense; it covered him like a cloak. The place was cool and shadowy, but there was no chill. Fatty found the sand not at all unpleasant, and wriggled down until he lay on his back, with his cap under his head.