“It’s silly to get scared of the dark and shadows this way,” she scolded herself.
With an effort she tried to concentrate on the persons who had built these tunnels. Patient people they must have been to cut these passages through solid stone with their old crude tools. They were probably Indian workmen, experienced in cutting stone. It must have taken them years and years to make these.
All at once it seemed to her that the shadow on her right took the form of a crouching Indian.
“Here I am being silly again,” she thought. “It’s because I’m standing still here that I’m nervous. It’s lonesome as well as scary, staying still in a spooky place like this.”
Looking around for something to divert her mind, she noticed the queer-shaped piece of metal in the niche and wondered what Florence had done with the other one. “Perhaps she dropped it when the bats frightened her,” she thought.
She cast the rays of her light over the floor till she finally found the piece of metal, then placed it back in the niche with its mate. “Jo and I can use one of these for a candle holder on the little table beside our bed, and Florence can use the other,” she decided.
Not seeing anything else of interest, she grew more restless than ever. “I wonder where this tunnel leads. I believe I’ll walk down it a little way. Florence and Jo probably won’t be back for several minutes. There’s no sign of their lights yet. I won’t go but a few steps. They might call, and I couldn’t hear them.”
She walked slowly a short distance, looking carefully on all sides. When she had gone about twelve feet she came to a narrow opening on her right.
She stopped and peered into it as far as her light would permit. “This place is certainly a network of passages,” she thought. “I wonder what this narrow one’s for.”
Her curiosity aroused, she turned into this new passage and kept straight ahead for a little way. Then as she flashed her light about, she caught a glimpse of another opening, to her left. Glancing into this opening, she saw at the farther end what appeared to be a door half ajar.