The sound of voices and footsteps now echoed loudly through the cavern. Lights were flashing here and there, and when Jimmie at last found himself inside the chimney, he knew that the very room he had recently left was being occupied by the outlaws.
The electric light was out again, and the boy groped with his hands in the darkness. Much to his surprise they failed to locate his chum.
“Ned!” he called softly. “Where are you hiding?”
Jimmie heard a chuckle in the darkness and felt a hand on his shoulder. Then Ned whispered in his ear:
“I guess I’ve stumbled on one of the hidden cells of the mission!” he said. “Anyway there’s a hole leading out of this chimney that’s big enough to keep house in.”
“We’ll be finding a train of cars and an East river ferryboat next,” Jimmie chuckled. “We always do find something when we go away from camp. If we don’t find anything else, we find trouble.”
It was thought safe, now, to turn on the electric light. The rays showed a room perhaps twelve feet in size with furniture and furnishings of the description of those in the chamber below. Although the apartment seemed to be somewhere near the center of a lofty finger of rock which lifted from the eastern slope of the mountain, the air was remarkably fresh and pure.
“There’s an opening somewhere,” Ned suggested. “A shut-in room like this would asphyxiate one if there were no ventilation.”
“Then I think we’d better be finding it!” Jimmie advised. “Just listen to those fellows chewing the rag in the room we recently left!”
The boys remained perfectly silent, then, and listened. There seemed to be several men in the chamber below, and two were talking in angry tones. There were plenty of torches below, too, for the red flare and the stink of them came into the boys’ hiding place by way of the fire-niche below. This is what the boys heard: