“Ooo!” he cried. “I wouldn’t go near it for a fortune. Bless my soul, there may be bears or snakes.”
This last suggestion made Dewey, who was then peeping in, drop down in a hurry.
“B’gee!” he gasped. “I hadn’t thought of that. And who knows but what a live Megatherium preserved from the tertiary periods may come roaring out?”
“I wish we had a light,” said Mark. “Then we might look in and see. I wonder if we couldn’t burn that book the Parson has?”
The Parson hugged his beloved “Dana’s Geology” in alarm.
“Gentlemen,” he said, severely, “I would rather you burned me than this book.”
“B’gee!” cried Dewey. “You’re most as dry! But a fellow couldn’t find a match for you, Parson, if he hunted from now till doomsday.”
Parson Stanard turned away with the grieved look he always wore when people got “frivolous.” But that mood did not last long; they were all too excited in their strange find to continue joking. They spent half an hour after that peering in cautiously and seeing nothing but blackness. Texas even had the nerve to stick one arm in, at which the rest cried out in horror. Indian’s direful hint of snakes or bears had its effect.
It took no small amount of daring to fool about that mysterious black hole. Dewey, ever merry and teasing, was keeping them all on pins and needles by being ceaselessly reminded of grisly yarns. He told of a cave that was full of rattlesnakes, “assorted sizes, all genuine and no two alike, b’gee!” Of another that had been a robber’s den with great red-faced, furious, black villains in it, to say nothing of gleaming daggers. Of another, with pitfalls, with water in them and no bottom, “though why the water didn’t leak out of where the bottom wasn’t, b’gee, I’m not able to say.”
It got to be very monotonous by and by, standing about in idleness and curiosity, peeping and wondering what was inside.