“You go first, Billie,” Vi urged nervously. “He is afraid of you——”
But at that moment a dancing light flickered down the dark passage and immediately Nick Budd himself appeared, carrying a lighted candle which he carefully shielded from the wind.
The terror had not left his face, and he looked at Billie abjectly, like a beaten dog.
“Will ye come in?” he asked in a barely audible voice. “Or shall I bring the things out here?”
But as the latter course would give the simpleton an excellent chance to retain some of his loot, Billie replied firmly that they would come in and see for themselves.
Vi made a noise that sounded something like a groan, and Connie echoed it pathetically. But they joined the queer little procession just the same, following Nick Budd down the dark passage to the still darker cave, guided only by the flaring light of his one candle.
It was a dangerous thing for the girls to do. The simpleton, with the cunning of the mentally-deficient, might have decided to attack them all there in the darkness of the cave. And he would have had a good chance of doing it, too.
But the gods that favor the daring watched over the girls that day and brought them safely through their adventure.
Billie had evidently thoroughly cowed the simpleton, and his one thought was to get rid of his stolen goods as quickly as possible and thus evade the dreadful prison that loomed more horrible to him than death.
There in a corner of the cave the girls found the knitting machinery model and the precious blue prints, besides a great pile of small trinkets that comprised pretty nearly everything that had been stolen from the girls during the last few weeks.