“You think you heard them close. That is because the mountain walls carry sounds from a long distance. It was the echo that came to us. The men who shouted are two miles away.”
For a moment Nick looked at the tall East Indian as if inclined to contradict him. Then he recollected that he had heard a great deal about these wonderful mountain echoes, and he said nothing.
“It is on the same principle as the whispering galleries of great buildings,” he thought. “I have heard whispers from a distance seemingly right in my ear in the Capitol at Washington. Why should I doubt the phenomenon in this wonderful land of strange things?”
“What’s the orders, chief?” suddenly broke in Patsy Garvan, whose unquenchable curiosity brought him over when he saw Jai Singh and Nick Carter in conference. “Do we go ahead and clean out those blacks in the mountains, or are we to take a quiet jaunt into the Land of the Golden Pelican, or whatever it is?”
“We shall get to the Land of the Golden Scarab in due time, I hope,” was Nick Carter’s quiet reply. “We shall start in five minutes. Tell everybody to get ready. And——”
But Patsy had already rushed off to announce joyfully that they were going into action, and he did not hear anything more from his chief.
CHAPTER II.
WHAT THEY FOUND IN THE CAVE.
“The fact that we know the rascals are two miles away makes it unnecessary for us to care about the moonlight,” remarked Nick Carter, as, ten minutes afterward he strode along a narrow ledge that wound its way up the mountainside.
“I am glad of it,” grunted Jefferson Arnold. “I didn’t want to wait for anything.”