“No,” he answered.
“I’m coming in to look at the cave,” said Sahwah, and she crawled carefully through the hole which had been much widened by Slim’s breaking through, and dropped down beside him. After her came the others, one by one, all anxious to see this chamber in the hillside. It was about as large as an ordinary sized room, the walls all rock, dripping with the dampness of ages. Katherine, blundering about in the darkness, which was only partly relieved by the flashlights, walked into something wet and cold. At her startled exclamation the others hurried over into the far corner with her and their flashlights shone on a good sized pool of water in the floor of the cave. It was being fed by a stream which came steadily through a fissure between two rocks. At one end of the pool the water flowed 256 out into a hole in the ground and was lost to view.
“It’s a spring!” said Gladys. “I thought I heard water in here when we came down.”
Mr. Evans dipped a pocket cup into the clear water and took a drink. “It’s a mineral spring!” he exclaimed in great excitement. “The same as the one on Ellen’s Isle. But the size of it! There’s a fortune in it for you, Judge. Think of the gallons of water that are flowing by some underground passage into the lake without ever coming to the surface! That’s the prettiest case of poetic justice I’ve ever come across, finding this spring on your land. Now you can go ahead and organize a new mineral water company that will have a real spring for a basis.”
“I’ll do it!” said the judge, “and all those who had stock in the old one will have first chance at this. What a lucky accident! I told you that idea of Katherine’s to bring Eeny-Meeny to the ravine was inspired.”
“Now I know the meaning of the arrow on the rock!” said Sahwah when they were all outside the cave again. “You see, it points directly toward the hillside where those rocks came rolling down. Somebody found that cave and the spring and marked the spot so they could come back again, and then they never came back and it went on being a secret.”
257“Now, Miss Katherine,” said Hinpoha, “was it so terribly silly after all to think that mark meant something?”
And Katherine cheerfully admitted that it wasn’t.
Hinpoha went on. “Captain,” she said, “didn’t you say you dreamed about water when you were fasting?”
“That’s what I did,” said the Captain.