This continued until finally Dig could restrain himself no longer.
“By the last hoptoad that was chased out of Ireland! How long’s this going to keep up? Is that Indian going to keep climbing down this hole forever?”
“Hush, Dig!” commanded Chet.
“I did not make the place,” said John Peep, with scorn. “White boy scared—he’d better have stayed out. Havens come. He not scared.”
“I’m not scared!” yelled Dig, his voice booming in the shaft. “By the last hoptoad—”
“And that’s silly,” interrupted John Peep quickly. “There is a legend to the effect that St. Patrick drove all the reptilian species out of Ireland; but it is doubtful if the eviction included the so-called common, or garden, toad.”
“Whew!” gasped Dig. “Did you hear that, Chet?”
His chum was chuckling and did not answer. Dig tried to treat John Peep as though he were an uneducated “blanket Indian,” as the uncultivated redmen were called. But John Peep had been some years at school and was notably the brightest scholar in his class.
Why he had taken to the woods and preferred to live in the wilderness, now that vacation had begun, Chet could only surmise.
It was just then that the Indian reached the bottom of the shaft. Or, rather, he reached the place where a hole was broken through the wall into the tunnel from the Crayton shaft.