Percy was right; for Bates without hesitation entered the water, which, fortunately, was no more than a mere sheet an inch deep, and began slowly to clamber up the slope.
Happening at this moment to glance upward, I noticed, on the edge of the cliff exactly above my head, a great wedge-shaped rock which looked so very much as though it were on the point of falling down that instinctively I pressed forward to get past the danger-point. As I did so, Percy, who was slightly in the rear of me, whispered hastily:
“Tom; hold back. Let me get in front of you. I have a shotgun cartridge in my pocket, and I want to drop it near the water as a guide to Jack, in case he should be able to trail us this far.”
“All right,” said I, without looking round; and forging ahead he succeeded in dropping the cartridge without exciting the suspicions of our watchful guard; with great circumspection making it appear that he was intent only upon urging the reluctant mules to follow Bates’s horse.
After a short upward climb between overhanging walls, we turned a corner and saw before us the low, arching mouth of a cave, whose floor, as far as we could see, was entirely covered by a pool of water, the source, undoubtedly, of the stream in which we stood.
Into this gloomy den rode Bates, the mules following, and Percy and I, side by side again, behind them. The depth of the water appeared to be about three feet, and as the darkness of the cave increased it was by the splashing of the mules alone that we were able to tell which way to go.
“Tom,” whispered Percy, when it had become so dark that we could no longer see each other, “Tom, here’s our chance. Let us slip off and sit down in the water until Squeaky has passed us.”
“All right,” said I. “Now?”
“Yes, now.”
But Squeaky frustrated our design. As if he had been suspecting some such move on our part, the wily rascal, at the very moment when I had freed my feet from the stirrups, struck a match, and holding it aloft, said: