Court laughed a little shakily and sat down suddenly on a rock. “Give me a chance, can’t you?” he begged. “I’ve only got one tongue, even though I can make that go pretty fast.”
“Cut it out and quit worrying him, fellows,” ordered Ranny. “Take your time, Court, and start at the beginning. How did you get down the hole?”
“Cinchiest thing you know!” grinned Parker. “I just stepped on the cover and went through. You see, when I went into that crack the hole didn’t show at all; there were a lot of branches and stuff over it. One minute I was on solid ground, and the next I was flying through space.”
“Gee!” exclaimed Sanson. “How deep was it?”
“Seemed about a mile; but I guess it wasn’t more than twenty feet. Luckily there was a lot of leaves and stuff at the bottom, so I landed pretty soft. But when I tried to climb back I found it was too slippery. Then I lost my voice yelling, but nobody came, so I started to look around a bit. It’s just one long tunnel, running both ways and braced up by rotten old timbers and things. I had my flash-light in my pocket, so I wasn’t afraid of being lost. I took the right-hand turn and–I say, fellows, there’s a bear down there!”
“A bear?” chorused the astonished audience as one boy.
In an instant he was surrounded by excited boys
“Well, it might be a wildcat or something like that. I only saw its eyes, but I tell you they held me up, all right. About three hundred feet from where I fell in there was another kind of a shaft thing, only not so big, sort of off to one side. It wasn’t very deep, either, for when I looked down I saw those two big yellow eyes that didn’t seem more than eight or ten feet down. Gee whiz! I was scared. I must have got turned around, too; because, when I came to, I found I was legging it away from the big hole instead of back toward it.”