For some time after the boys had realized that their efforts were fruitless, they remained without speaking. Each was busy with his own thoughts. And they were not pleasant ones. Their situation dawned on them in all its horrors.
They were trapped, shut out, perhaps forever, from the sight of men, doomed possibly to die amid the lingering agonies of hunger and thirst in this subterranean enclosure, to which greater terrors were added by the darkness.
Life was sweet to them. They had barely tasted its delights, were merely standing on its threshold. The blood ran strongly through their veins. Were they to be cheated of their birthright?
From these gloomy meditations, Don roused himself with a determined shake of his shoulders.
“Brace up, Brick,” he counseled. “We’re worth a dozen dead men yet. Let’s see if we can’t find some way out of this hole.”
They felt around the walls until they found a passage, so narrow that it permitted them to walk abreast only by crowding against each other.
“Let’s go,” said Don. “Whatever it leads to can’t be any worse than this.”
They had gone along for perhaps a hundred feet when suddenly their feet slipped out from under them and they sat down with a thud on a pavement as smooth as glass and shot down a steep slope as swiftly as though they were on a toboggan!
CHAPTER XV
A Frightful Apparition
Startled, confused, bewildered beyond measure, Don and Teddy were whirled down the steep incline at a dizzy speed, until at last they were thrown out on the stone floor at its foot in a medley of tossing arms and legs.