“Dan,” he said, “may I speak with you a moment?”
The older boy walked away from the curious group of girls.
“We did not know that Meg Heger had come,” Bob began, “and we were just going to call out that we had found another place where we would like to look for the lost box. It’s such a queer place, Dan, but it is one that as yet we have not investigated. Can’t we get away from the girls somehow? Gerald and Julie and I want to show the spot to you at least.”
“Why, I presume so,” Dan agreed, and after explaining to the three older girls that Bob and the youngsters wished to show him something, he followed them back along the brook. It was the way that he had gone on that day when he had first visited the Heger cabin. When they reached the waterfall which Dan had thought so pretty, they climbed down to the red rock basin into which it fell. Excitedly, Gerald pointed back of the tumbling water.
“Look-it, Dan!” he fairly shouted. “See that little cave opening in there! Doesn’t it look to you as if it had been made with a pickaxe? Bob thinks it does.”
Dan looked through the transparent sheet of hurrying water and smilingly shook his head as he replied:
“I don’t suppose that a human being has ever been through that crevice, and, moreover, I don’t quite see how we can investigate, do you, Bob?”
Dan, noting the disappointed expression on his small brother’s face, turned toward the older boy.
“We sort of had it figured out that Gerald could stand back of the waterfall and then he could see better whether that is just a crevice in the rocks or the mouth of a cave.”
The youngest boy looked up eagerly. “You know, Dan, I fetched along my bathing suit. Mayn’t I go back to the cabin and put it on? Mayn’t I, Dan?”