Sam called to him to return but the boy paid no heed to the warning.
“Come on!” Carl urged the next moment. “We’ve got to go with him.”
Sam seized a package of sandwiches which lay on the roughly constructed table and darted with the boy across the corridor, through the east chamber, into the subterranean one, and passed into the tunnel, the entrance to which, it will be remembered, had been left open.
Some distance down in the darkness, probably where the passage swung away to the north, they saw a glimmer of light. Directly they heard Jimmie’s voice calling softly through the odorous darkness.
“Come on!” he whispered. “We may as well get out to the woods and see what’s doing there.”
The two half-walked, half-stumbled, down the slippery incline and joined Jimmie at the bottom.
“Now we want to look out,” the boy said as they came to the angle which faced the west. “There may be some of those rude persons in the tunnel ahead of us.”
Not caring to proceed in the darkness, they kept their lights burning as they advanced. When they came to the cross passage which led to the rear of the corridor they listened for an instant and thought they detected a low murmur of voices in the distance.
“Let’s investigate!” suggested Carl.
“Investigate nothing!” replied Jimmie. “Let’s move for the machine and the level of the stars. If the savages are there, we’ll chase ’em out.”