“What’s the matter with pulling the stones down?” asked Jack. “We ought to be able to do that.”
The boys brought all their strength to bear on one of the topmost stones, and it fell with a crash into the passage.
They were about to put their hands to another rock when Jack uttered an exclamation of alarm and drew Frank away.
“This seems to be the haunted mine all right!” the boy whispered, “There’s a light beyond this wall!”
Frank put his eye to the aperture, gave one look into the interior, and then sprang away.
“It’s a wood fire, too!” he whispered. “And there are half a dozen as ugly looking gnomes as you ever saw sitting around it. They must have heard us talking, or heard the stone when it fell, for they are looking this way. It seems to me,” he went on, “that this is one of the quietest little Boy Scout expeditions anyone ever heard of!”
“Shall we try the back passage?” asked Jack.
“We’ve got to try it!” Frank replied. “At least, we’ve got to get so far away from this chamber that they won’t see us if they come and look through the hole we made in the wall.”
“The danger is,” Jack decided, “that they have seen our lights or heard our voices. In that case, here are two Boy Scouts who won’t be apt to get out of the tunnel for a few hundred years.”
The heavy tread of footsteps and the sound of guttural voices speaking in a tongue with which the boys were unfamiliar were now heard on the other side of the broken wall, and the boys switched off their lights and started resolutely up the steep grade by means of which they had reached the spot. It was hard climbing and they made slow progress.