To be sure, a three-cornered tunnel, the second floor back of a lofty cave, would be the last place to look for such an ambush, unless there was some fly-trap opening to it from above. But there might be!
Boys and girls, both, their blood flamed upon the fear, then froze–until the silence, the bat-churned cave silence, was hung with icicles above them.
Then, once more, it was ripped from on top by that perishing shriek–passing strange, remote–but now it was as if the fissure’s three-cornered mouth filled with it, faintly gibbered the one word: “C-caught!”
“’Caught!’ Oh! Stud, you warned him; it’s his own doing. Let those other two boys–his friends–climb up to him! Well–if you feel–you–must?”
Jessie’s cry gibbered in agony in her throat, too, liquid as the thrush-tone in terror for its mate. But it struck a high note at the end.
For Stud’s hand was groping mechanically for the bright little lamp above his forehead, as if for inspiration, his left for the lariat at his waist, in defiance of his threat that the desperado in the “pot” might have tears in his eyes before he would help him.
But there was something worse than cave-tears in question now–of that Studart felt sure.
And Pem, watching,–Jessie, too–caught from an entering shaft of day-light which shivered as if aghast, the reflection of the tightening glow upon his young face–the waggish features of the Henkyl Hunter!
And she recognized it, by the feeling of her stiff, cold cheeks, as she clapped her hands to them–did Toandoah’s little chum–for the glow which had electrified her own when she fought her way out of a swamped Pullman, saving her friend, driving it into the teeth of the flood, and of the World, too, that neither her father’s honor, nor his invention–nor anything he ever turned out–was a Quaker gun; letting fly with it faintly at a rescuing youth, too, when she bade him “take Una first.”
For by that glow as by an altar-lamp, in whose gleam she had worshiped before she saw as the strong boy’s hand went automatically to his equipment that lamp and lariat were nothing–nothing–“without the heart of a Scout!”