Johnny Thompson did not sleep long in the hunchback’s curious cave. Everything was too strange for that. There were too many matters that needed thinking through.
He did not waken suddenly, nor all at once. For a time, only half awake, he lay there wondering. Who were these mysterious airmen? Why had they taken him prisoner? Would they follow the track of the hunchback’s sled and attempt to recapture him? He sincerely hoped they would not.
“Could be but one end to that,” he told himself. “They’d be shot through and through by my Indian friend’s arrows.” He had seen that Indian kill a grizzly bear with those arrows.
He thought of Ginger, his dog leader.
“Did he escape, or did they kill him?” He was bound to believe that his good pal of many a long trail was safe.
“And if he is,” he whispered to himself, “if he is—” Suddenly he sat straight up, wide awake. A thought had struck him squarely between the eyes. “If Ginger is alive, he has gone back over the trail. He has told Sandy MacDonald that something is wrong. They will start back over the trail. They will follow until they come to the camp of those mysterious aviators. Then Sandy will be made prisoner. And Ginger! They will surely kill him this time.
“It must not happen! I must attempt to find that trail and head them off. There is not a moment to lose! I—”
He broke off to stare about him. His startled eyes, roving from corner to corner of the cave and from floor to ceiling, had, even in his excitement and anxiety, taken note of an astonishing fact. He was in a cave. There was no lamp. Not an oil lamp, not an electric torch was to be found; and yet the place was illumined. And outside it was still night.
“It’s the walls,” he told himself. “They are all alight.
“D’Arcy! D’Arcy Arden!” He put out a trembling hand to shake his companion into wakefulness. “D’Arcy! Wake up! We are surrounded by walls of light!”