“I don't see how you are going to get into your hole in the ground,” said Craig, with a laugh of pleasant anticipation.
Pole picked up a big, smooth stick of hickory, shaped like a crowbar, and thrust the end of it under the largest rock. “Huh! I 'll show you in a jiffy.”
It was an enormous stone weighing over three hundred pounds; but with his strong lever and knotted muscles the ex-moonshiner managed to slide it slowly to the right, disclosing a black hole about two feet square in the ragged stone. From this protruded into the light the ends of a crude ladder leading down about twenty-five feet to the bottom of the cave.
“Ugh!” Craig shuddered, as he peered into the dank blackness. “You don't mean that we are to go down there?”
It was a crisis. Craig seemed to be swayed between two impulses—a desire to penetrate farther and an almost controlling premonition of coming danger. Pole met the situation with his usual originality and continued subtlety of procedure. With his big feet dangling in the hole he threw himself back and gave vent to a hearty, prolonged laugh that went ringing and echoing about among the cliffs and chasms.
“I 'lowed this ud make yore flesh crawl,” he said. “Looks like the openin' to the bad place, don't it?”
“It certainly does,” said Craig, somewhat reassured by Pole's levity.
“Why, it ain' t more 'n forty feet square,” said Pole. “Wait till I run down an' make a light. I've got some fat pine torches down at the foot o' the ladder.”
“Well, I believe I will let you go first,” said Craig, with an uneasy little laugh.
Pole went down the ladder, recklessly thumping his heels on the rungs. He was lost to sight from above, but in a moment Craig heard him strike a match, and saw the red, growing flame of a sputtering torch from which twisted a rope of smoke. When it was well ablaze, Pole called up the ladder: “Come on, now, an' watch whar you put yore feet. This end o' the ladder is solid as the rock o' Gibralty.”