She made herself as comfortable as she could, drew her camera from its case, focused it upon the yawning, black mouth of the cavern and waited a patient quarter of an hour, noiseless and listening and ready. For she was familiar enough with the California brown bear to know that he will not attack when the way of retreat is clear; that while, after he gets into a fight he extracts a great deal of delight from it, still if given his choice he would rather run and keep on moving until he had covered anywhere from ten to sixty miles.
[Illustration: She made herself as comfortable as she could,
drew her camera from its case, and waited a patient quarter of an hour.]
When nothing but silence answered her, she leaned out on the limb and tossed her hat into the mouth of the cave. After it she threw some big pieces of bark, making them land well inside with no little noise. As there was still no sound she waited no longer.
The branch out upon which she edged her slow way was both sturdy in itself and made doubly safe by the fact that it lay across the ledge, reaching with its tips to the rock wall at the side of the natural door. In a moment she had scrambled across, had leaped to her feet and was peering into the vast, shadowy interior.
There are few of us for whom a cave does not have a rare attraction, an appeal little short of fascinating, that has in it something of romance perhaps, certainly something of mystery and a dim, vague stirring of primitive and vital feelings, a shadowy harking back to the early life history of mankind. To Wanda Leland, in so many essentials a child of the wild, such a cavern as this was a bit of wonderland. Her swift running, pioneer blood tingled; her heart gladdened with a glow of discovery and exploration. Perhaps cave men had dwelt here, secure and watchful, in the forgotten ages; the idea thrilled. Certainly no man of her own time or her father's knew of the place: that thought made the spot her own, and intensified her eager delight in finding it. It had, to her sensitive, imaginative nature, an aura that she felt had clung to it always. It was a bit of the wild, the retreat of the wild things, sternly expressive of a savage grandeur.
Her sensations a strange composite of many dim, intangible, inexpressible emotions, Wanda tiptoed to the opening, paused listening, took two or three quick steps and was inside the cave. For a moment she fully expected to see the sight she dreaded, a pair of gleaming points of light blazing at her menacingly. And for a little she saw nothing but shadowy, unreal shapes. Her heart leaped wildly as the startling fancy came to her that these were the phantoms of the long dead time when men had lived here, ghosts of the older race.
Then she laughed softly again, once more accused herself of being "stupid," and began her explorations. Little by little as she grew accustomed to the scant light here she made out dim bits of detail. First she realised that her first conjecture had been quite right, and that this was the biggest cave by far that she had ever seen. She moved forward half a dozen steps, walking warily for fear of a fall and found that the light from the entrance died into deep darkness before it could search out the sides of the great cliff room. Then she went back out upon the ledge and gathered from the debris choked fissure an armful of broken bits of dry wood, twigs and needles from the cedar. In the pocket of her blouse were the matches which she always carried with her on her trips and in a moment a crackling flame near the cave door shot its wavering light deep into the dark interior. Then again she hurried in, eager to see what lay before her.
Nowhere was the rock roof lower than ten feet save where far back it slanted toward the floor. The floor itself sloped so gently toward the back that it seemed quite level. She judged at first glimpse, as the firelight drew from the gloom a glinting granite surface here and there, that the chamber was twenty feet wide, that it reached back into the cliffs some fifty feet. She moved back toward what seemed the rear wall, found the floor pitching steeply ahead of her, noticed a rush of fresh air stirring her hair and paused suddenly, listening. A low sound that at first she could neither locate nor analyse, came faintly to her as from a great distance.