“If the bulb’s broken,” he thought as a cold chill set his teeth chattering. “Not much fun spending the night down here with these bats.”
A little cry of joy escaped his lips as the light flashed on and the bats, as if touched by a magician’s wand, vanished from sight.
His joy was short lived. The place he was in was small, not over fifteen feet from corner to corner. And the walls that towered above him, some twenty feet, instead of running straight up, slanted in from bottom to top.
“It’s as if I had been sitting upon the very tip-top of a twenty foot pyramid,” he told himself, “and the tip crumbled in, letting me drop inside.”
“Wish it was made of paste-board,” he told himself, tapping the solid stone wall. “But it’s not, and I’m here.”
He sat down to think. Here indeed was a predicament. Neither Curlie nor Dorn knew where he had gone. He would not be able to get out by himself. When he did not return they would search for him. But in that vast pile of brick and stone what chance was there of being found? In its day it had been the most massive fort in the western hemisphere. Ten thousand troops had been quartered there. There were hundreds of holes and caverns, dungeons and passages to be searched.
“And there is the jungle all about,” he told himself. “They may think I have been kidnapped by natives and may go searching there.”
But Johnny was young. What was still better, he had a firm faith in the ways of Providence.
“I will hear them walking on the wall,” he told himself. “I’ll call to them.”
He did hear someone walking on the wall and did call. The result, however, was far different from what he expected.