“No thanks. But I’ll join the rest to-night. A little dirt on my face will make it all right, and I’d rather be with folks than in this terrible place.”
“A little timid, huh?”
“I’ll show you whether I’m timid or not!”
The girls were breathless, wondering what was going to happen, but the ferocious Bill was evidently possessed of soothing powers. “No, now there ain’t no call to git excited. There’s going to be enough people here when the schooner comes in.”
“Yes,” sarcastically said the other man. “You’re going to make enough money to give up fishing by that time, aren’t you?”
“I might if they wasn’t others I had to divide with,” growled Bill. “You pay attention to yer own affairs. You got it fixed with Ives about yerself?”
“Yes.”
The girls heard Peggy gasp, but the voices were not sounding as if either man were very near the “Steeple Rocks speaking tube,” as Leslie began to call it. Probably Peggy would not be heard.
For some little time the girls sat still, in uncomfortable positions, but they heard nothing more. Peggy was the first to jump up, and by the light of the flashlight which she carried, they all found their way back to the opening and crawled out. “I forgot to look, girls,” said Leslie, “to see if there were other rocks that could get loose outside, and after we were in there, listening to Bill and that other man, I began to think what if a rock fell down and closed up this hole!”
“We could have called down the speaking tube, Leslie,” Sarita suggested.