“Hey, sis! You know what?” Horace said in a whisper. “There’s heat down here, and I don’t like it. What do you suppose makes it so warm?”
“It could be only a furnace,” Judy said.
She came upon it so unexpectedly that she let out a little shriek and then laughed at herself for doing so. She had been right.
“It is!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Horace! That’s all it is. I don’t know what I thought it was at first, but it’s a little pot-bellied stove with pipes branching out in all directions. Come and see!”
Horace came at once and saw the furnace. There it sat like a squat, red-eyed demon in a little lair of its own. It was burning coal from a bin beside it, and the fire showed through a grate in the door. Horace opened it to show Judy the blaze.
“Comforting, isn’t it?” she said. “Though I wonder how they get the coal down here. And who shovels it? I hope, whoever it is, he doesn’t shovel us in.”
“He might. How do we know he doesn’t have horns and a tail? This place needs more than heat to take the chill out of it,” Horace said with a shiver. “A little warm sunlight would help.”
“There is a little light where we dropped into the tunnel,” Judy remembered. “There may be other openings, too. A coal chute, maybe. There must be light of some kind in those locked rooms.”
“I hope there is,” agreed Horace. “It would be pretty dismal in there where that man is without any light at all.”
“He could live down here, I suppose, with light and heat,” Judy went on thinking aloud. “But why? Surely nobody would choose to live underground like a mole. If he’s hurt, Horace, why doesn’t he want us to help him? He said he wanted us to leave him alone to die. It doesn’t make sense.”