“Shivering centipedes, we’re stuck!” groaned Persimmons abjectly.
“Hold on a minute,” counseled his companion, “wait till I strike another match. Thank goodness, we brought a good supply of them.”
“Yes, it’s a lucky thing that Mountain Jim insisted on our filling the match safes. We’d be in an awful fix without them.”
To the huge delight of the boys, the light showed them that the rift branched off in two directions at the point they had reached. They had bumped into the rocky wall that formed the apex of the triangle at which the two new passages met the old one.
But now they faced a fresh problem. Which passage would they take? They tossed a coin. Heads would be the right-hand one, tails the left. The coin indicated the right-hand rift and into it, accordingly, they struck off. The floor of the passage appeared to rise abruptly and they soon found their further progress blocked by a rocky wall.
“Perishing panhandles, what’ll we do now?” gasped young Simmons.
“Try the other one,” was his companion’s brief response.