"Then you go down cellar," advised Frank, "and see if there is no way out from there. I'm bound to get to Ned and Jimmie if I have to begin operations with my gun."
Presently Sandy's voice was heard from below. He said that he felt a current of air, as if there were a passage leading outside.
"Come on down an' see," he said.
The boys went down a steep ladder, after fastening both doors on the inside, and soon found themselves on the cellar bottom. Frank turned on his flashlight and looked about. There was a hole in one of the walls which seemed to lead downward, in the direction of the river.
"I'm going to try it," Jack exclaimed, taking out his light. "When I say for you to come on, come a-running."
He said for them to come on in a moment, and Sandy and Frank soon found themselves in a square subterranean room which must have been cut near the surface and just outside the wall of the hut. It was a comfortless place, and they lost no time in looking for a way out.
"Here it is!" Sandy called out, directly. "Here is a tunnel. Say, but
I never knew about this before. Come on!"
Frank led, but proceeded only a short distance. Then his light rested on the grinning face of a Chinaman.
The tunnel was guarded. The boy turned back and looked into the tunnel by which they had entered the chamber. Within a foot of the muzzle of his searchlight he saw the grinning face of another Chinaman.
He stepped back to the mouth of the tunnel and motioned Jack to guard the exit, explaining, briefly, that they had been trapped, not in a hut on the street level, but in a subterranean chamber where they could not be heard, and where no one would ever think of looking for them.