“That’s it all right and I believe there’s an opening up there, but how are we going to get up to it? It’s all of twelve feet from the floor.”
“And there isn’t a thing here to help so far as I can see.”
“Well, let’s sit down and think it over. Maybe something will bob up. I didn’t see how I was going to signal to you when I first heard you up there, and I guess I rolled over every square foot of the floor before I got my hands on that piece of rock.”
CHAPTER IX
BURROWING.
“The ladder, Jack, the ladder!”
After another thorough search of the chamber which had disclosed nothing to aid them, the boys had sat for some moments side by side on the hard floor each busy with his own thoughts. It was Bob who had broken the silence.
“Well, what do you know about that? Please kick me where it will do the most good. Talk about being dumb. Here we’ve got a perfectly good ladder right close by and we never thought of it.”
In another moment they had crawled back into the other room and were examining the old ladder which led up to the trap door.
“It’s nailed fast to that piece of wood,” Bob said.
“No it isn’t,” Jack insisted and to prove that he was right he grabbed hold of it and proved that while it was nailed fast to the piece of wood as Bob had said, the latter was in no way fastened to the wall.