“I don’t see any river, though,” said Peanut, to the girl he was with, as they went through the woods behind the cabin.
“Of course you don’t; it’s a lost river,” she said.
“Oh!” said Peanut. “I forgot that. Well, here’s where it was lost, I guess.”
The guide just ahead of them had suddenly disappeared into a hole in the ground, helping Art and the pink girl down after him.
“My goodness!” exclaimed the girl at Peanut’s side. She was a small girl, with very black eyes, which twinkled. The other girls had called her Alice.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Peanut reassured her. “We’ve been falling down places since six o’clock.”
“I wasn’t thinking of myself,” Alice answered, “but of poor Mamma. Mamma isn’t so slender as—as you are.”
“Mr. Rogers will look after Mamma,” said Peanut. “Come on!”
He dropped ahead of her into the hole, and clasping his hands in front of him, made a stirrup for her to put her foot in, like a step, as she followed.
They found themselves on a rocky ledge, with another drop ahead of them. At the bottom of this drop stood the guide, Art, and the pink girl, in daylight. The place was really the bottom of a little cañon, concealed in the woods, and a small river (not much more than a brook) flowed along it. On their right, to the east, however, the river vanished completely out of sight, into a great piled up mass of boulders. The leaders waited till all the party had arrived at the bottom, and then the guide led the way directly in among these boulders, the girls and women screaming and laughing as they followed.