It was only Pant. What they saw before them caused involuntary ejaculations. A hole some eighteen inches square had been cut in the frozen wall.
For a second they listened. The silence was so complete that the ticking of a watch sounded like the beat of an alarm clock.
“They’ve gone,” whispered Pant. “C’mon.”
His light blinked out. There followed the sound of garments rubbing against the walls. The man behind Pant felt him one instant, the next he was gone. He had crawled through the hole. There was nothing to do but follow. One by one, thrusting their rifles before them, they crawled through this narrow door from the mine. To what? They could not even guess.
“’Tis fair spooky,” whispered Jarvis to Dave. “’Ow does ’e know ’ow ’e should go? Can ’e see in the dark? ’Ow’d ’e come by the name Pant anyway?”
“Langlois give it to him,” Dave whispered back, “the fellow that was killed here, you know. He claimed Pant could see in the dark and began calling him ‘Panther Eye.’ The men cut it down to ‘Panther,’ then to ‘Pant.’ That’s all I know about it.”
“’E’s rightly named,” growled Jarvis, as he fumbled his way through the hole in the dark.
“This way,” came the low whisper of Pant. “As you were, hand to shoulder.”
Only the soft pat-pat of their footfalls on the floor of what appeared to be a narrow runway broke the tomb-like silence of the place. Now and again, as they moved forward, Dave Tower felt his shoulder brush some unseen object. Each time he shivered and shrank back. He expected at any moment to hear the roar of rifles, to find himself engaged in deadly combat with the mysterious robbers who had looted the mine of its treasure while they worked within a stone’s throw of it.
Twice they paused. A silence so deep that it was painful ensued. No sound came. They marched solemnly on. And now, they had struck a steep incline.