The light turned off, they sat down to listen. Perhaps they could hear something more, if the people were still in the cave. Peggy suggested that perhaps they had heard the Count and someone back in the office. “I feel pretty sure that they have something back in the rock,” whispered she, “perhaps a real cave, and more than just Dad’s safe.”
But Leslie shook her head. “I may be mistaken, but I think that this came from below.”
As if to confirm her words, there came the sound of conversation, a mere murmur at first, then a few words very loudly conveyed by this queer speaking tube which nature had provided. The next were fainter, and then there was the murmur. “He’s walking around,” Leslie suggested.
Peggy had a picture of someone restlessly pacing a cave.
“Well, I hope that Ives will hurry up this house party. I’m certainly sick of staying here. How do I make up as an English lord, Bill?”
A hoarse laugh was the answer to this, but Bill was not standing so close to the fissure, it was obvious.
“And how am I going to get out of this?”
“Same way you got in, by boat and at night.”
“Why can’t I leave in the daytime if you can?”
“Well, in the first place, you wouldn’t care to play the fisherman, I think, the way you look now, or to stay in one o’ the shacks with the rest o’ the crowd. I kin take you out to-night, if you want to go, but what I’m going to do now is to swim under water a ways. Want to try it?”