“It might be that you can only hear it in that part of the tunnel where we were,” went on Rick.
“How do you mean?” asked his chum.
“Well, I mean it’s an echo and you can only hear it in certain places. You know back in Frog Hollow at home, there’s one place where there’s a big echo, but ten feet on either side of it you can’t make it echo at all.”
“Yes, I remember that,” admitted Chot. “It might be like that. Anyhow the howls have stopped.”
And so they had—at least the boys did not hear them any more. This was a relief to them, and they began to feel hungry. They found some flat rocks, raised from the floor of the old river tunnel bed, and sat on these to open their lunch packets and water bottles, feeding Ruddy on the scraps and pouring out some water for him in the hollow of a rock.
“He hasn’t lost his appetite, anyhow,” remarked Rick with a laugh, as he noticed how eager Ruddy was for crusts and bits of meat.
“He hardly ever does,” agreed Chot.
Then the boys kept on again, moving cautiously through the black tunnel. At one point they came to a ledge of rock over which, it was evident, some underground waterfall had tumbled when the river ran through the concealed cavern. But now the cascade was dry.
“Guess we’re stuck,” remarked Chot, as he looked at the abrupt face of the rock over which water had formerly toppled.
“Maybe we can climb it on one side or the other,” suggested Rick.