Then he hailed Nat in as cheerful a voice as he could muster. He told him what he was going to do and begged him to keep up his courage. Nat replied bravely that he could hold out a while longer; but the weakness of his voice made it painfully evident that if help was to be furnished him it would have to come quickly or be too late.
Joe noticed, now that his sight was quickened by the need of hasty action, that off at one side of the chamber was a recess cut in the rocks. He hastened over to it and found that within it was an ancient chest of some sort of sweet-smelling wood. This was so dry-rotted with the ages that a vigorous kick of the lad’s foot smashed the moldering lock off and Joe hastily threw the lid open.
He could not refrain from uttering a cry of joy as his eyes noted its contents, some spears, axes, of stone or flint—whose former purpose seemed only too evident—and, best of all, a coil of chain, forged of the same peculiar greenish metal as the ring had been.
“Hurray!” shouted Joe as he dragged out the chain, “this is what we wanted. Now I’ll have Nat out in no time.”
Hastening back to the lip of the well with the chain, he dangled its end, which terminated in a hook, over the edge. As he did so he gasped at the hot fumes which arose from the cylindrical pit. Joe was only just in time. Nat had barely strength enough to fasten the chain under his armpits and begin scrambling up as Joe hauled with all his might.
But if the hole had not been small enough in circumference for Nat to brace his legs against one side of it and help work himself up in this way, Joe would never have got him out. As it was, the task almost exhausted the strength of both boys, and when it was completed they lay gasping at the edge of the well for some moments, utterly unable to command their limbs.
Joe was the first to recover. The sun had now reached the zenith, and through the mammoth burning-glass was pouring hotly into the well. A sudden idea struck Joe. He tore a bit of paper off an old envelope he happened to have in his pocket and let it flutter into the pit.
As it dropped waveringly the paper turned brown, then black, and as it struck the bottom of the sun-heated pit it dissolved altogether into shrivelled cinder.
Joe turned away from the pit with a shudder. The thought of the fearfully narrow escape Nat had had almost unnerved him. But for Nat’s sake he did not let the other lad see how shaken he was. Shortly after Nat, though still weak, was sufficiently recovered to get shakily to his feet. Then the two lads set about to find a way out of the sacrificial cave. First, however, they armed themselves with a stone-axe apiece.
The arched entrance of another passage than the one by which they came opened off on one side of the cavern, and as they peered into it they could feel a sharp puff of delightfully cool air. “That means that this passage leads out into the open,” cried Nat gleefully. “Come on, Joe, we’ll soon be out of this mess.”