“They must have had fun, those two,” sighed the Captain enviously. “I thought I had fun when I was a kid, but Uncle Jasper Carver had it all over me with this cave and secret passage of his.”
Slim and Justice echoed his envious sigh. In their minds’ eye they too had traveled back with Uncle Jasper to his lively boyhood and saw a panorama of delightful plays passing in review, with the secret passage and the pirate’s cave as the background.
The last thing that came out of the chest was a flat stone on which had been carved the names “Jasper the Feend” and “Tad the Terror,” bracketed together at both ends and surmounted by a wobbly skull and cross bones, under which was carved the legend, “Frends til Deth.” When Sahwah saw it she could not keep back the tears at the thought of this wonderful boyish friendship which had endured through thick and thin, and then had ended so bitterly. To Sahwah the breaking up of a friendship was the most awful thing that could happen. There were tears in Katherine’s eyes, too, and the three boys looked very solemn as the stone was laid back in the chest.
“Now let’s go and see where the passage leads on to,” said the Captain, when the treasures of the two youthful pirates had been replaced in the chest. At a point opposite to the passage by which they had entered the cave another passage opened, or rather, a continuation of the first one, for the cave was merely a widening out of this subterranean tunnel.
“This way out,” said the Captain, lighting the way with his lantern.
“Why, there’s a door here!” exclaimed the Captain, when they had gone some thirty or forty feet into the passage.
The door was just like the one beside the ladder in Carver House; tremendously heavy, bound in brass and studded thickly with nails. It had been painted over with bright red paint, but here and there the paint had chipped off, showing the metal underneath. It was set into a doorway of brick and mortar. Over the knob was a curious latch, the like of which they had never seen. To their joy it snapped back without great difficulty and they got the door open.
Several stone steps down, and then they saw they were in a cellar passage.
“The passage comes out in another house!” said the Captain. “I wonder whose?”
“It must be that old empty brick cottage that stands at the foot of the hill,” said Sahwah, who knew the lay of the land from the previous summer. “We often used to poke around in it and wonder who had lived in it. In the old days it must have been a place of safety for the American soldiers. It’s at the back of the hill, toward the woods. The soldiers probably escaped through the woods.”