“If there is this much of a cave here, why mightn’t there be one somewhere below? We haven’t found the way to one, but we just might have missed it.”
“That is so, Peggy,” said Leslie. “Isn’t this odd!” Leslie and Sarita were sniffing till Peggy laughed at the whole performance.
“If I looked as funny as you girls do, sniffing and going from one crevice to another, I wonder that you didn’t make fun of me at the start!”
“We were more interested in the smoke than in how anybody looked,” Sarita returned. “It is stronger way back here, don’t you think so?”
Sarita was back where she was obliged to stoop considerably. There was a crack, or fissure, and a hole of no great size into what Peggy called the “inner darkness.” “I believe that I could crawl into that,” said Peggy, with some decision.
“Not for the world!” cried Leslie. “My dear chief investigator of the ‘tri-feminate,’ you might step off into space and fall into some crevice that we never could get you out of!”
“That would be a calamity,” grinned Peggy. “I won’t then,—not now, at any rate. It must be as you think, somebody is smoking somewhere and a current brings the odor up here,—but some way that theory doesn’t satisfy me.”
“That is because we scent a mystery, Peggy,” said Sarita. “It’s fun to imagine things. I’d just as lief find Bill to be a villain, but perhaps we’d better not meddle too much with things around here, Peggy.”
Peggy set her lips together. “If there’s anything that ought to be found out, why, then, it ought to be,—that’s all there is about it!”
Peggy’s attitude settled it. Though the older girls felt that care should be taken not to go beyond the bounds of courtesy within the limits of Steeple Rocks, they certainly had no objections to Peggy’s solving any mystery there, particularly if the Count were the chief villain.