“Go easy now,” Bob whispered. “We don’t want them to hear us or they will be watching the other opening, that is if there is one.”
“Let me go first, I found it,” Jack insisted a few minutes later after they had dragged the ladder through the hole and had raised it in the corner.
“All right, but I’ll be right at your heels.”
“Must be a hole through here,” Jack announced as soon as his head was up above the ledge. “There’s a pretty strong draft here.”
“How big is it?”
“It’s none too large, but I reckon we can squeeze through.”
“Look out you don’t get stuck in it.”
By this time Jack’s feet had disappeared from sight or rather from touch for, since he had the torch Bob was unable to see a thing. He followed as rapidly as he could raise himself over the edge of the rock. As Jack had said the passage was a pretty tight fit, in fact there was barely room enough for him to hitch his body forward inch by inch. A few feet ahead he could hear Jack grunting and puffing as he crawled along. He had gone but a few feet when a sudden thought struck him. Suppose the men above had heard them and, suspecting what they had done, should drop through the trap and—
“But it’s too late to worry about that now,” he thought. “Probably they’d think that one of us was on guard and be afraid to risk it anyhow.”
It seemed to him that they had been in the passage for a long time although it really was only a few minutes, when Jack called back: