"Heavens an' earth!" gasped Evan Morgan.
John Trevna gazed open-mouthed, for he had little breath left in him.
And from the black mouth of the tunnel the strange and terrible figure of the dead man looked quietly down at them and filled them with amazement.
Trevna's heavy charge had blown in the top of the skull. The shrunken yellow face wore the gaunt eager look of one who had died the slow death of starvation. It seemed to be trying to get at them to bite and rend them.
Peter Vaudin was the first to climb the wall behind him, but the rest were close at his heels, and hustled him up through the crack under the slab.
Peter struck down towards the landing-place the moment he had wriggled through.
"Stop then, Peter," called John Drillot, in a low insistent voice, lest that dreadful thing below should hear him.
"Not me! I've had enough, John Drillot. That is not what we came for ... and I had hold of its leg last night," and he shivered at the recollection, and the thought that it might have turned on him and gripped him with its grisly hands.
"I don't know what it is," began John Drillot, "but—"
"It's the man I shot inside there," said Trevna.