“I don’t know. Something rushed by my head,” said Perry excitedly, as he looked vainly round in the dim light, and then back at the faintly lit-up entrance to the cave, where the lantern, now invisible behind a curve, shone upon the moist stone wall.
“Come along back,” cried Cyril; “what cowards they will think us. It must have been birds. Ah! yes; look, dozens of them,” he cried, pointing to where what seemed to be faint shadows kept gliding out and shooting upward over the face of the rock, to disappear at once in the evening gloom.
“Think they are birds?” said Perry, in an awe-stricken voice.
“Birds or bats,” said Cyril. “How stupid to be startled like that! Come along.”
He sturdily led the way back, ashamed of the sudden access of fear which had come upon him; though entering so strangely weird-looking a place by the feeble light of a lantern, and when unnerved by long toil and the dangers they had lately passed through, it was not surprising, and stronger folk might easily have been scared.
He had hardly got well inside again before his face was brushed by a soft wing, and he felt ready to run back once more, but this time he mastered the dread, and felt that Perry’s hand was laid upon his arm just as the colonel’s voice, which sounded hollow, echoing, and strange, said softly: “Goes in, perhaps, for miles.—Look, boys.”
The voice sounded close to his ear; but to his surprise he found that the lantern was quite a hundred yards in, and the light glimmering from the surface of the tiny stream, while there was plenty of room on either side for them to walk.
“Where are you, boys?” said the colonel, more loudly.
“Here, sir; coming,” cried Cyril, who grasped the fact, now, that their sudden rush out had not been noticed.
“It’s all safe so far; no crevices or chasms,” said the colonel; and as the two lads approached, “Did you see the birds? They are flying about overhead in flocks. Hark at the rush of their wings!”