The upshot of the whole matter, to put it briefly, had been just this: The wild and woolly Texan had vowed that morning, after having been tormented by the mystery for two whole days, that down where he came from men weren’t afraid of anything—man, beast or devil; and that he was going to go up and find out about “that air bizness,” if it was the last thing he ever did in his life.
The audacity of the proposal had rather taken the Banded Seven aback. The idea of daring to enter that cave, after the horrible danger into which the yearlings had gotten, had never quite occurred to them. But Texas vowed he was going to do it alone, if he couldn’t get anybody else; that he would be ashamed to call himself a son of his father, “the Honorable Scrap Powers, o’ Hurricane County, Texas,” if he didn’t. And so that settled the matter.
“When are you going?” Mark asked him.
And Texas answered promptly:
“To-night.”
The result of which startling announcement had been that the Seven, as appeared from the conversation previously mentioned, stood pledged by a solemn promise to probe that mystery to the bottom that very evening.
“The thing that puzzles me so much about this matter,” Mark observed to his friends as they strolled down the street, “is the fact that Rogers and his crowd are unwilling or afraid to tell anybody about the cave and what happened. I can’t to save my life conceive why they should be so quiet.”
That was a strange state of affairs for a fact; the plebes talked it over nearly all day, without coming to a conclusion. The cave was within bounds, and the yearlings had a perfect right to go there that Saturday afternoon. So they need not have feared to tell the authorities for that reason. Questioned they certainly must have been; their wounds and torn uniforms must certainly have made the superintendent inquisitive. But they had stuck tight to their secret and apparently told not a soul. The matter would have been the talk of the post if they had.
“It may be they’re ashamed of how we fooled ’em,” was Dewey’s suggestion.
That did not seem at all probable, but it was the best the Seven came to, and finally they were compelled to adopt it.