"Not much!" answered practical Tom Reade. "Why, fellows, ice is just what we need at the camp. Let's get a closer look at it and make plans for an ice-box over at the camp."
"But I want to follow that man of mystery," protested Dave.
"Go ahead, David, little giant," Dick laughed. "We won't stop you. But we've lost our man of mystery, anyway, and this cave contains something that we really do want. Tom, you're the mathematician of the party. How much ice is there here?"
"If I could see better I could tell you better," sniffed Reade.
"Hundreds of tons of it, anyway."
"How did the stuff get here?" asked Dan wonderingly.
Dick was now at the edge of the ice pile, and flashed the light at the roof of the cavern.
"See the rifts in the rock up there?" he asked. "Water must have leaked in here during the heavy winter rains. It was cold water, too. Then, in extra cold spells, such as this country experiences, the water must have frozen. As heat doesn't get in here in warm weather the ice may have been here for generations. Fellows, we may be looking upon ice that was here when George Washington was a boy."
"I've read, somewhere," declared Tom soberly, "that icebergs that float down from the polar regions in spring often represent ice that is at least ten thousand years old. Fellows, some of this very ice may have been here in this cave long, long before Julius Caesar went into the soldiering business!"
That thought had somewhat of an awesome effect upon Dick & Co. The four high school boys felt as though they were in the presence of great antiquity.
"But the practical side of it," declared Tom, "is that we must devise the best way of cutting some of this ice and getting it across the lake to the camp."