“Of course I’m afraid,” Frank admitted. “You go in there, and crawl on your knees through the thick air of a narrow tunnel, and put your hand on a dead man’s face, and feel your other hand slipping in the blood on the floor, and you’ll be afraid, too. I’m not going back there.”
“We can stand here in the rain all night, if you want to,” Pat said, with scorn in his voice. “Rainwater is said to be good for the complexion.”
The wind was slowing down and the rainfall was not so heavy as before. The boys, Pat and Jack, joking Frank about his terror for the cave, and Frank just a little angry, began the ascent of the slope leading to the plateau.
“The rain saved the trees next to the mountain,” Pat said, presently, “and if it checked the fire on the plateau at the same line our tents are all right. Say,” he added, “who ever heard of such a downpour as that. I reckon the rain swept in from the ocean in heavy clouds which were broken open by the mountains.”
“Much you know about it!” laughed Jack. “You talk as if you could cut a cloud with a knife.”
“Anyway,” persisted Pat, “the water tumbled out and checked the fires. Wonder what became of the man who said his name was Greer? He was standing in with the men who were trying to burn the aeroplane, all right enough, and I believe the whole circus was started just to destroy the airship and bring Ned’s investigations to a close.”
“We always do get into the thick of it at the first jump,” Frank said, remembering the bomb under the cottage in the Canal Zone and the raid on the nipa hut in the Philippines. “Whenever we’ve got anything coming to us, we get it by lightning express.”
“You bet we do!” Jack exclaimed. “Now we’re getting a clear sky,” he added, pointing upward, “and we’re getting it short order time, too!”
The heavy clouds were gone, the moon was smiling down on the drenched earth, the stars were winking significantly toward a spot on the plateau where two unrecognizable figures, half burned away, were lying. When the boys reached the top of the climb and advanced to the spot where the aeroplane had stood they turned sick with the horror of the thing.
“I almost wish we had let them destroy the aeroplane,” sighed Frank. “I don’t like to think that these men came to their death through us. It is awful!”