From where they stood at the edge of the marsh they could see the cottage among the trees. A look of inquiry passed between Nyoda and Migwan. Calvin saw the look and understood it.
“Would you like to look in Uncle Peter’s house?” he asked. His face was very pale, and Nyoda, watching him keenly, thought she detected a sudden suspicion and fear in his eyes. He looked apprehensively over his shoulder at the Red House as they started to skirt the bog. Nyoda understood that movement. Abner Smalley did not know that they knew about Uncle Peter, and Calvin had said he would be very angry if he found it out. Now he would be sure to see them going toward the house. But this thought did not make Nyoda waver in her determination to search the cottage. The urgency of the occasion released them from their promise of secrecy. As Calvin had no key they were obliged to enter by the window as on former occasions. But the front room was absolutely blank and bare and they saw the impossibility of anyone’s being hidden there. It was a tense moment when they opened the door of the inner room and the girls who had never been there stepped behind the others and held their breath. Uncle Peter sat at the table just as Nyoda and Migwan had seen him a day or two before, playing with his rods and wheels. His mild blue eyes rested in astonishment on the number of people who thronged the doorway.
“Come in, ladies,” he said, politely. The room was exactly as it had been the other day and apparently he had not stirred from his position. They all felt that Sahwah had not been there and that the old man knew nothing about the matter. But Calvin spoke to him.
“Uncle Peter,” he said. The man turned at the name and stared at him but gave no sign of recognizing him. “Do you know me, Uncle Peter?” said Calvin. “It’s Calvin, Jim’s boy.”
The old man smiled vacantly and held out the bit of machinery he was working on. “It’s a machine for saving time,” he said. “As the minutes are ticked off——” There was nothing to be gotten out of him, and they withdrew again. Calvin looked around him fearfully as they returned through the fields, to see if his uncle had watched him take the girls to the cottage, but there was no sign of him anywhere, at which he breathed an unconscious sigh of relief. Tired out with their ceaseless searching and sick with anxiety, they returned to Onoway House.
If we were writing an ingeniously intricate detective story the thing to do would be to wait until Sahwah was discovered by some brilliant piece of detective work and then have her tell her story, leaving the explanation of the mystery until the last chapter, and keeping the reader on the verge of nervous prostration to the end of the piece. But, as this is only a faithful narrative of actual events, and as Sahwah is our heroine as much as any of the girls, we know that the reader would much prefer to follow her adventures with their own eyes, rather than hear about them later when she tells the story to the wondering household. And we also think it only fair to say that if Sahwah’s return had depended on any brilliant detective work on the part of the others we have very grave doubts as to its ever being accomplished. We will, then, leave the dwellers at Onoway House to their searching and theorizing and bewailing, and follow Sahwah from the time they started to play hide-and-seek and Hinpoha blinded her eyes and began to count “five, ten, fifteen, twenty.”
Sahwah ran across the garden toward the house, intending to swing herself into one of the open cellar windows. Near this window was a flower bed which Migwan had filled with especially rich black soil. That morning she had watered the bed and had done it so thoroughly that the ground was turned into a very soft mud. Sahwah, not looking where she was going, stepped into this mud and sank in over her shoe top with one foot. When she had entered the window she stood on the cellar floor and regarded the muddy shoe disgustedly. Feeling that it was wet through, she ripped it off and flung it out of the window. It landed back in the muddy bed and was hidden by the growing plants. Sahwah then proceeded to hide herself in the fruit cellar. This was a partitioned off place in a dark corner. She sat among the cupboards and baskets and watched Hinpoha pass the window several times as she hunted for the players. Once Hinpoha peered searchingly into the window and Sahwah thought she was on the verge of being discovered and pressed back in her corner. There was a basket of potatoes in the way of her getting quite into the corner and she moved this out. There was also a barrel of vinegar and she slipped in behind this. As she moved the barrel it dropped back upon her shoeless foot and it was all she could do to repress a cry of pain as she stood and held the battered member in her hand. But the pain became so bad she decided to give up the game and get something to relieve it. She pushed hard against the barrel to move it out, but this time it would not move. She pushed harder, bracing her back against the wooden wall behind her, when, without warning, the wall caved in as if by magic, and she fell backwards head over heels into inky darkness. The wall through which she had fallen closed with a bang.
Sahwah sat up and reached mechanically for the hurt foot. The pain had increased alarmingly and for a time shut out all other sensations. Then it abated a little and Sahwah had time to wonder what she had fallen into. She was sitting on a stone floor, she could make that out. It must be a room of some kind, she decided, but the darkness was so intense that she could make nothing out. “There must have been another part to the cellar behind the fruit cellar, although we never knew it,” thought Sahwah, “and the back of the fruit cellar was the door.” As soon as she could stand upon her foot again she moved forward in the direction from which she thought she had come and searched with her hands for a doorknob. But her fingers encountered only a smooth wall surface and after about five minutes of careful feeling she came to the startled conclusion that there was no such thing. “I must have got turned around when I tumbled,” she thought, “and am feeling of the wrong wall.” She accordingly moved forward until her outstretched hands encountered another hard surface and she repeated the process of looking for a doorknob. No more success here. “Well, there are four walls to every room,” thought Sahwah, “and I’ve still got two more trys.” Again she moved out cautiously and with ever increasing nervousness admitted that there was no door in that direction. “Now for the fourth side, the right one at last,” she said to herself. “One, two, three, out goes me!” She moved quickly in the fourth and last direction. Without warning she ran hard into something which tripped her up. She felt her head striking violently against something hard and then she knew no more.
She woke to a dream consciousness first. She dreamed she was lying in the soft sand on the lake shore near one of the great stone piers, where a number of men were at work. They were pounding the stones with great hammers and the vibrations from the blows shook the beach and went through her as she lay on the sand. Gradually the sparkling water faded from her sight; the sky grew dark and night fell, but still the blows continued to sound on the stone. Just where the dream ended and reality began she never knew, but, with a rush of consciousness she knew that she was awake and alive; that everything was dark and that she was lying on her face in something soft that was like sand and yet not like it. And the pounding she had heard in her dream was still going on. Thud, thud, it shook the earth and jarred her so her teeth were on edge. For a long time she lay and listened without wondering much what it was. Her head ached with such intensity that it might have been the throbbing of her temples that was shaking the earth so. After a while that dulled, but the jarring blows still kept up. With a cessation of the pain came the power to think and Sahwah remembered the strange noises they had heard issuing from the ground. It must be the same noise; only it was a hundred times louder now. It was a sort of clanging thump; like the sound of steel on stone. Even with all that noise going on Sahwah slipped off into half consciousness at times. Although there did not seem to be any doors or windows, she was not suffering for lack of air, but at the time she was too dazed to notice this and wonder at it.
She woke with a start from one of these dozes to the realization that there was a broad streak of light on the floor. Fully conscious now, she raised her head and looked around. She was lying in a bin filled with sawdust. When she held up her head her eyes came just to the top of it. By the light she could see that she was indeed in a sort of sub-cellar. It must have been older than the other cellar for the floor was made of great slabs of mouldy stone. Her eyes followed the beam of light and she saw that a door had been opened into still another cellar beyond. In this chamber a lantern stood on the floor, whence came the light, and its ray produced weird and fantastic moving shadows. These shadows came from a man who was wielding a pickaxe against a spot in the stone wall. It was this that was causing the jarring blows. Startled almost out of her senses at seeing a man thus apparently caged up in the sub-cellar of Onoway House, Sahwah could only lay back with a gasp. She could not raise her voice to cry out had she been so inclined.