“I—I guess I don’t want to come,” said Janet slowly.
“Why not?”
She thought for a minute while Ted looked at her over the edge of the hole.
“’Cause what are you going to stand on when you get all the way through the hole to China? There won’t be anything there and you’ll fall. I don’t want to fall.”
Teddy thought this over a minute and then said:
“Well, maybe I won’t go all the way to China. I forgot about falling through. But I’ll dig a deep hole anyhow.”
And he did—so deep that at last Jan had to stand on the very edge of it and look down in it before she could see her brother.
“Don’t go down any farther,” she begged. “You maybe can’t get out again.”
“Yes I can,” declared Ted. “You get the little ladder we play light street-lamps with, an’ I can climb out.”
This ladder was a side from an old wooden crib that Trouble no longer slept in, and Ted and Jan often used it in their games.