Boiling with indignation and likewise considerably alarmed, the two boys had to submit to the indignity of being tied in the ropes till they resembled two packages bound securely round and round with twine. Like lifeless packages, too, they were presently picked up and helplessly borne toward the rear of the camp.
The cliff face towered for some distance above the base of the narrow valley at this point, and at its foot the boys, as they were bundled along, noticed a dark fissure. Tom judged it to be the mouth of a cave. He was right. And in a few minutes he learned also that it was to fulfill another purpose—that of a prison.
Death and Squinty set down their burdens at the entrance, and then rolled them inside just as if they had been bales of inanimate goods of some kind. The boys’ feelings were not soothed by the fact that fully a score of chattering, grinning Chinese watched the operation. These fellows were quartered back of the camp, and evidently formed a part of the consignment brought in on the schooner the night before.
The cave did not extend very far back in the rock face, and was narrow and low. But there was plenty of room in its narrow confines for two lads, bound as they were. Their two jailers shoved them as far in as possible and then without a word left them. Or so it seemed, but Tom’s eyes—about the only part of his body he could move—presently lit on a motionless figure sitting smoking on a rock near the cave entrance.
It was Death. A long rifle across his knees showed that he was acting as sentinel.
“Jack, old boy,” said Tom, at length, “how are you coming along?”
“As well as can be expected, as they say when a fellow’s been given up for dead and buried,” chuckled Jack.
His tone and words cheered Tom mightily. His brother, then, still retained his spirits, and hopeless as their position seemed that was something.
“Looks pretty bad, Tom,” said Jack presently. “I wish we could have got that medicine through to uncle.”
“So do I,” agreed Tom. “So far as this imprisonment is concerned, I imagine they will only keep us here till they get Chillingworth’s promise to let up on them.”