While they stood there in an excited, anxious group Don came panting up, wet from a swim from the Rambler. Alex began grumbling because the boat had been left alone, but Don stopped him.
“I heard what they are saying about the iron room,” Don said, “and the boys being locked in there! I used to know the location of the spring that opened that door from the cellar, but I can’t think of it now. If I only could!” he cried beating his forehead with his fists.
The old house was tumbling fast. The thin bank which ran along the river side was now caving, and the ground around the structure, which was considerably lower than the surface of the river, was being flooded. Captain Joe pulled at Alex’s leg, drawing him toward the house!
“I’m going in there to try to find the spring,” Don said, but as the three lads started for the crumbling old house the officious crowd seized and drew them back!
CHAPTER XII.—ANOTHER GREAT DISAPPOINTMENT.
At first the incoming water seeped through the bank of the river, under the surface, as Clay’s excavation had cut almost through the narrow bulk of earth between the house and the water’s edge. Then, as the underground current carried earth with it, undermining the bank, the cellar began to fill from the surface and the line of light under the sills became simply an aperture for the delivery of water into the basement of the old house.
“This is getting serious!” Clay exclaimed, as the cellar filled to the depth of a foot or more. “We’ve got to do something right off or we’ll be drowned like rats in a trap!”
“I learned once, when a kid, how to open this iron door from the inside,” Tom announced, “but I have forgotten. We lived with Uncle David for a time, Don and I, until he became too stingy to buy food and clothing for us, and one day he showed us all about this treasure room, as he called it. Don remembered, but I did not. If Don were only here now!”
Clay turned his electric light on the door, weaving it over every inch of the iron sheathing and the stone walls on each side.
“If there’s a spring or anything of that kind here, we ought to be able to find it,” he declared. “Was it down low or up high. You were a little shaver then, did you stand up in a chair to reach it, or did you bend down to the floor? You ought to be able to remember.”