At his wits’ end for a verbal retort, he presently proceeded, after the manner of his kind, to throw a stone in his own garden.
“See here! you kids, if you’ll let me stand on your shoulders, you two, I’ll give those Tin Scouts an eye-opener,” he said, retaliating after a manner to hurt only himself, as he addressed the two younger boys with him, his eyes cast up to that mysterious fissure, outlined, a rocky tripod, above his head, of which the Scoutmaster had remarked that all behind it was black as a tinker’s pot.
Into that ebony pot, forthwith, climbing by the willing step-ladder of his companions’ bodies, Ruddy, the rashling, presently thrust his head–that flaming head with all his chances in it!
His body followed, finding entrance through the crevice amidships, so to speak, where it broadened out to some three feet across from the tapering point of the lowest corner.
“Oh-h! look at him. Do look at him!” panted the girls, held up in their search for pale-faced cave flowers and strange fungi by the “derring-do” act.
“Gracious! some of you scouts ought to stop him–re-al-ly ought to stop him,” shrilled Jessie, catching her breath at the shock of darkness visible in the yawning fissure’s mouth, where the brief flicker of a match now chased bogies.
“Humph! We can’t head him off, Jess.” Her brother disclaimed responsibility with a shrug–while the little lamp winked sarcastically from his hatbrim–but in the heedful tone of the boy who had been trained to feel–as Toandoah did with his little petticoated pal–that Life was a game in which two could hunt together, even upon the trail of a Thunder Bird, and make good headway. “We can’t turn him back!” Stud shrugged his khaki shoulders. “But he’ll strike a blind bargain in there. Ha! There goes another ‘niggling’ match!”
A frippery flame, indeed, its reflection flickered a moment, a gold tooth in the fissure’s grinning mouth–darkness followed!
Two or three of the boy scouts–those who did not, like Stud, show incredulity, sarcasm gleaming, hawk-eyed, from a ruby lamp hooked to a hatband, and from a level eye beneath it–held their breath, dazzled; for the moment beaten at their own brave game of exploring.
So did the girl who had been piqued and dared into sitting in the Devil’s Chair–with a sheer abyss beneath her!