"Serves you right!" declared Will. "You had no business getting up in the middle of the night and wandering off into the mine!"
"What did you do?" demanded Tommy.
"We waited until morning, and then enlisted the services of the caretaker," replied Will. "So far as I can remember, this is about the nine hundredth relief expedition we've been out on in search of you boys!"
"Seems to me," Tommy chuckled, "that you're the lads that were in need of the relief expedition! We found you boxed up in a chamber in a boat."
"But we wouldn't have been in any such mess if we hadn't started out to look you up!" George declared.
"We should have been back before you got out of bed this morning, if some one hadn't cut our string," replied Sandy. "We had a cinch on getting out, but some geezer led us a fool chase by cutting our cord and steering us around in a circle."
"Did you see any one?" asked Will.
"Not a soul!" was the reply. "But there's some one in here, just the same. We heard the call of the Wolf Patrol a long time ago and we've heard it several times since."
"What do you mean by some one cutting your string?" asked George.
"Why," replied Sandy, "we tied the loose end of a ball of twine to one of the shaft timbers and unwound the ball as we moved along, expecting to follow it back when we wanted to get out."