"Why, ladder's gone!"
"Jemima! you don't say so. Why—how——?"
"It's gone, all right," replied the leader, as he peered by the light of his candle into the gloomy recesses of the cave. "Clean gone! Don't see it on the floor below, so it can't have dropped."
Joe, squeezing abreast Sandy, and doubling the light power, added his eyes to those of his mate in the search.
"No go," said he, after a keen but vain search. "Anyway, I can see how to get down easy enough." So saying, he placed his stick across the mouth of the passage, jamming it on either side into an interstice. "There!" he exclaimed, as he hung his weight upon the transverse beam, which, though bowing, did not crack when bearing his weight. "Let's put the rope round this, an' we'll slip down less'n no time."
"Wait a jiffy, Joe," said Sandy, who had been critically eyeing the staff. "We'll make 'assurance doubly sure,' as your father said in his sermon last Sunday,"—poking his stick while he spoke, into the same cavities as the other occupied. "That will stiffen it. It's easy enough getting down: we could jump, for that matter. It's the getting up that's the problem. There, it's as stiff as a fire-bar now. Here's the first to go down."
Holding the rope, the boy swung off, and was soon standing on the floor of the lower cave. The others followed rapidly. They could find no trace of the missing ladder. Not only was the ladder spirited away, there were other signs which showed that the caves had been entered since the last visit of the boys, and on proceeding to the third chamber, where the bushrangers slept, there were manifest signs of disturbance.
"Some un's been here, that's certain."
Sandy gave voice to the one opinion. The bark bunks occupied by the outlaws were thrown off their trestles to the ground. There was no gainsaying Sandy's statement. The situation was peculiar. The boys might well be pardoned for being a little fearsome and creepy under the circumstances.
"I heard Dickson tell your father, Sandy, at the brumby hunt, that a party was comin' out from Tareela to visit the caves. P'r'aps it's them that have moved the ladder."