“There were three of you. Now there are but two. Where is the other?”
For answer, Jean took up the heavy walking stick, and after pointing at the stone door, made as if to push it back.
The girl’s eyes opened wide in surprise. Then as her face became thoughtful she backed away to sit down upon the flat rock. There, for five minutes, with head bent low, hands pressing her temples, she sat perfectly still.
“Thinking it out,” whispered Roderick. “I wonder what she will do.”
In spite of her fears for Johnny’s safety, Jean felt a certain great confidence in this child’s ability to solve the puzzle and set her hero free. Why not? Was she not a native of the place? Did she not know the secrets of the land?
“And yet,” she thought with a sinking heart, “why should she? She is little more than a child, while the secrets of this place, if one is to judge by the dust and crumbling decay of rocks, are old as time itself.”
Suddenly the Indian girl leaped to her feet. With a swift movement she crossed the corridor and pressed her ear against the stone door.
As she stood there listening, across her face there spread such a smile of joy as it had seldom been Jean’s privilege to see.
Then the Indian girl motioned for Jean to put her ear against the stone door as she had done.
What she heard was a faint tick-tick-tick, or the drip-drip-drip of water. She could not tell what it was, the sound was so very faint.