“We must be pretty careful if we do; there may be people here.”
The boys proceeded cautiously toward the dim opening in the wall that rose on their right. The surface over which they walked was smooth, but had the feel, under their feet, of earth. They paused outside the doorway and listened intently, but could hear no sound.
“I’m going to strike a match,” said Raymond, “and see what there is inside.”
“Don’t make a light out here,” remonstrated Sidney; “that would show us too plainly to any one who might be looking this way. I think it would be safer to step inside the door. I don’t believe there is any one here or we should have heard some sound.”
Raymond stepped carefully inside the door and struck a match, holding it up till the flame burned steadily. When the light shone clear it revealed a good-sized room that was perfectly bare. The walls were of rough stone, similar to the walls of the jail, and the floor was of earth packed hard and smooth. There was no indication that the room had been occupied, and it certainly was empty enough then.
The match died down and Raymond turned back to the doorway where Sidney waited. The mystery of their surroundings made both of them thoughtful,—the strange, narrow alley that climbed the steep hill, shut in on both sides by walls or buildings, they did not know which; then the house in whose door they were standing, that was reached, so far as they knew, only by a ladder, and that was so providentially unoccupied; the silence that covered the place, too, though to be sure it was probably after midnight, an hour when a town should be silent, if ever. All the conditions were weird and mysterious.
The boys stood in the doorway and tried vainly to pierce the darkness about them. The sky was clear and starlit, but there was no moon, and the mountains, which seemingly nearly surrounded them, were black and without form, and shut out most of what light there would otherwise have been. In front of them was the narrow, level space on which they had landed when they climbed the ladder, and beyond that fell a slope which appeared, in the gloom, to be set with knobs. Whether those knobs were rocks or buildings the boys could not tell. They thought, however, that they must be buildings, else what had become of the village? Back of them rose the mountains.
“What do you make of it, Sid?” asked Raymond, still in a whisper, for they had a sort of feeling that there were people near.
“I can’t make anything of it. If this is a town, and I suppose it must be, it’s the most curious one I ever heard of. We’ll just have to wait till daylight, and I hope we shan’t find then that we are in the midst of a hornet’s nest of savage mountaineers.”
“We’d better go into that room and get some sleep,” said Raymond; “I begin to feel pretty used up after that run uphill. I should think you’d be too, with the heavy load you had to carry.”