“I bet it works the slide opening from below here,” said Justice. He gave it a vigorous pull and they heard the same click that had followed the twisting of the stair post. In a moment the light that had come down through the opening vanished, and they knew that the landing had gone back into position. Another pull at the rope and it opened up again.
“Pretty slick,” commented Justice. “It works two ways, both coming and going. A fellow on the inside could get out, and a fellow on the outside could get in, without the people in the house knowing anything about it.”
“Are you coming now?” asked the Captain. “I’m going to start.”
He opened the door in the outer wall as he spoke. It swung inward, crowding them in the narrow space in which they stood. A rush of cold air greeted them. The Captain held the lantern in front of him and peered out into the darkness.
“There are some steps down,” he said.
He stepped over the threshold and led the way. Six steps down brought them to the floor of a rock-lined passage, a natural tunnel through the hill.
“Carver Hill must be a regular stone quarry,” said Justice. “All the cellar walls of Carver House are made of slabs of stone like this, and so is the foundation.”
“There are big stones cropping out all over the hill,” said the Captain. “It’s a regular granite monument. What a jolly tunnel this is!”
“And what a gorgeous way of escape!” remarked Justice admiringly.
“But what need would there be of an underground way of escape?” asked Katherine wonderingly. “What were the people escaping from?”
“This house was built in the days of the Colonies,” replied Justice sagely, “and the Carvers were patriots. That probably put them in a pretty tight position once in a while. No doubt they concealed American soldiers in their home at times. This passage was probably built as a means of entrance and escape when things got too hot up above. British troops may have been quartered in the house, or watching the outside. What a peach of a way this was to evade them!” he exclaimed in a burst of admiration.
“I wish I’d lived in those times,” he went on, with envy in his tone. “They didn’t keep fellows out of the army on account of their throats then. What fun a soldier must have had, getting in and out of this house, right under the nose of the British! Suppose they suspected he was in the house and came in to search for him? He’d just turn the post on the stairs, and click! the landing would slide open and down the ladder he’d go and out through this passage. The enemy would never discover where he went in a million years.”
“Come on, let’s see where this passage comes out,” urged the Captain, and started ahead with the lantern.
The passage sloped steeply downward, with frequent turns and twists.
“We’re going down the hill,” said the Captain.
“Whoever heard of going down the inside of a hill,” said Sahwah.
“It’s like going through that passage under Niagara Falls,” said Slim, “only it’s not quite so wet.”
After another sharp turn and a steep drop they came out in a good-sized chamber whose walls, floor and ceiling were all of rock.
“It’s a cave!” shouted the Captain, and his voice echoed and re-echoed weirdly, until the place seemed to be filled with dozens of voices. A cold draught played upon them from somewhere, and, although they all had on sweaters and caps, they shivered in the chilly atmosphere. There was no glimmer of light anywhere to indicate an opening to the outside.
The light of the lantern fell upon a wooden bench and a rough table, both painted bright red. On the table stood two tall bottles, thickly covered with dust, and between them was a grinning human skull with two cross bones behind it. Katherine and Sahwah involuntarily jumped and shrieked when they saw it.
“Somebody died down here!” gasped Sahwah.
“Nonsense!” said Justice. “It was Uncle Jasper playing pirate. See, there’s his chest over there.”
Against the rocky wall stood a large wooden chest, likewise painted bright red, with a huge black skull and cross bones done on its lid.
“That must be Uncle Jasper’s ‘Dead Man’s Chest,’ that he mentions in his diary,” said Sahwah. “Of course, this is the pirates’ den where he and Tad played.”
The five looked around them with interest at this playroom of the two boys of long ago, its treasures living on after they were both dead and gone. Truly the den was a place to inspire terror in the heart of a luckless captive. Skulls and cross bones were painted all over the rocky walls, grinning reflections of the one on the table. Sahwah and Katherine clung to each other and peered nervously over each other’s shoulders into the darkness beyond the radius of the lantern light.
“What a peach of a pirate’s cave!” exclaimed the Captain enthusiastically. “Captain Kidd himself couldn’t have had a better one. It seems as if any minute we’ll hear a voice muttering, ‘Pieces of eight, pieces of eight.’” He picked up one of the bottles from the table and set it down again with a resounding bang.
“‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,
Yo! ho! ho! And a bottle of rum!’”
he shouted in a fierce voice which the echoes gave back from all around. “This must have been the life!”
“Those must have been the bottles from which they drank the molasses and water that they used for rum,” said Katherine. “What fun it must have been!”
“I wish I’d known Uncle Jasper Carver when he was a boy,” sighed the Captain. “He must have been no end of a chap, and Tad, too.”
“Let’s have a look at what’s in the chest,” said Justice.
He raised up the heavy oak lid and the Captain held the lantern down while they all crowded around to see. One by one he lifted out the pirates’ treasures and held them up; wooden swords, several tomahawks, a white flag with a skull and cross bones done on it in India ink, a stuffed alligator, a ship’s compass, a section of a hawser, a heavy iron chain, deeply rusted, a pocket telescope, a brass dagger, a pair of bows and a number of real flint-headed arrows, and a box of loose arrow heads which the Captain seized eagerly.
“Glory! what wouldn’t I have given for a bunch of real Indian arrow heads when I was a kid,” he said enviously.
“They look like Delawares,” said Justice knowingly, pawing them over.
“How can you tell?” asked the Captain.
Justice explained the characteristics of the dreaded weapon of the Lenni-Lenape.
Slim and the Captain could not dispute him because they didn’t know anything about arrow heads, so they listened to him in respectful silence.
“They must have had fun, those two,” sighed the Captain enviously. “I thought I had fun when I was a kid, but Uncle Jasper Carver had it all over me with this cave and secret passage of his.”
Slim and Justice echoed his envious sigh. In their minds’ eye they too had traveled back with Uncle Jasper to his lively boyhood and saw a panorama of delightful plays passing in review, with the secret passage and the pirate’s cave as the background.
The last thing that came out of the chest was a flat stone on which had been carved the names “Jasper the Feend” and “Tad the Terror,” bracketed together at both ends and surmounted by a wobbly skull and cross bones, under which was carved the legend, “Frends til Deth.” When Sahwah saw it she could not keep back the tears at the thought of this wonderful boyish friendship which had endured through thick and thin, and then had ended so bitterly. To Sahwah the breaking up of a friendship was the most awful thing that could happen. There were tears in Katherine’s eyes, too, and the three boys looked very solemn as the stone was laid back in the chest.
“Now let’s go and see where the passage leads on to,” said the Captain, when the treasures of the two youthful pirates had been replaced in the chest. At a point opposite to the passage by which they had entered the cave another passage opened, or rather, a continuation of the first one, for the cave was merely a widening out of this subterranean tunnel.<
br />
“This way out,” said the Captain, lighting the way with his lantern.
“Why, there’s a door here!” exclaimed the Captain, when they had gone some thirty or forty feet into the passage.
The door was just like the one beside the ladder in Carver House; tremendously heavy, bound in brass and studded thickly with nails. It had been painted over with bright red paint, but here and there the paint had chipped off, showing the metal underneath. It was set into a doorway of brick and mortar. Over the knob was a curious latch, the like of which they had never seen. To their joy it snapped back without great difficulty and they got the door open.
Several stone steps down, and then they saw they were in a cellar passage.
“The passage comes out in another house!” said the Captain. “I wonder whose?”
“It must be that old empty brick cottage that stands at the foot of the hill,” said Sahwah, who knew the lay of the land from the previous summer. “We often used to poke around in it and wonder who had lived in it. In the old days it must have been a place of safety for the American soldiers. It’s at the back of the hill, toward the woods. The soldiers probably escaped through the woods.”
“Let’s go on into the cellar proper and up into the house,” said the Captain, eager to continue his exploration.
But what he proposed was impossible, for they discovered that the end of the passage was blocked by a huge stone that had fallen out of the wall. It filled up the space from the floor to the low ceiling, all but a few inches at the top and a few inches at the one side, where an irregularity in its contour did not fit against the straight side of the wall. A very faint light from the cellar showed through these crevices, and a cold draught of air played like a thin stream down the backs of their necks.
“There doesn’t seem to be any way of getting out around that rock,” said the Captain. “Can you see any way?”
They all looked diligently for some way to get over, or around it, or through it, and soon admitted that it was impossible.
“How on earth did that fellow ever get in from this end?” asked Justice in perplexity. “There isn’t a ghost of a show of getting through.”
“He couldn’t have,” said Katherine decidedly, “unless he really was the devil, as Hercules believed.”
“Or unless the stone fell after he was in,” suggested the Captain.
“But if he came in this way and went out again, how does it happen that the door here was fastened on the other side?” asked Sahwah.
“I give it up,” said Justice. “I don’t believe he came in this way.”
“Maybe he didn’t come in through the secret passage at all,” said Slim. “Maybe he did come in through the upstairs window, as we thought at first.”
“But how about the paint?” objected Sahwah. “He stepped into it and tracked it down the stairway. He must have come in through this way.”
Just then Katherine reached up to brush her hair out of her eyes, and her cold hand brushed Slim’s neck. He jumped convulsively, lost his footing, and pitched over against the door, which went shut with a bang. He was up again immediately, and stretched out his hand to open the door, but it resisted his attempt.
“I guess she’s stuck,” he remarked. Justice and the Captain both lent a hand, but not a bit would the door budge. They gave it up after a few minutes, and stared at each other in perplexity.
“The door’s locked!” said Justice in a voice of consternation.
“The lock must have snapped over from the jar when the door banged,” said Sahwah.
“I don’t see how it could,” said Justice skeptically.
“Oh, yes, it could,” replied Sahwah. “The same thing happened to me once with our back screen door at home. It slammed on my skirt one day, when I was going out, and the latch latched itself, and there I was, caught like a mouse in a trap. I couldn’t pull my skirt loose and I couldn’t unlatch the door from the outside. There was nobody at home and I had to stand there a long while before someone came and set me free. Latches do latch themselves sometimes, and that’s what this one has done now!”
“Well, we’re caught like mice in a trap, too,” said Justice gloomily. “With the passage blocked at this end, and the door locked, how are we going to get out of here?”
“Break the door down,” suggested Sahwah.
“Easier said than done,” replied the Captain. “What are we going to break it down with? You can’t knock down a door like that with your bare hands.”
Nevertheless they tried it, pounding frantically with their fists, and kicking the solid panel furiously.
“No use, we can’t break it down,” said Slim crossly, nursing his aching hand. “My knuckles are smashed and my toes are smashed, but there’s never a dent in the door. You’d think the old thing would be rotten down here in this hole, but it’s so covered with paint that it’s waterproof. It isn’t wet enough to rot it,” he finished unhappily, scowling at the piles of dust at his feet.
“We’ll have to call until somebody hears us and comes down,” said Sahwah.
“Nobody’ll ever hear us down here,” said Justice. “We’re on the lonesome side of the hill, remember!”
Nevertheless they did shout at the tops of their lungs, and called again and again until their ears ached with the racket their voices made in the closed-in little place, and their throats ached with the strain.
“Nobody can hear us!”
The disheartening realization came to them all at last.
“Do you suppose we’ll have to stay down here until we starve to death?” asked Sahwah in an awe-stricken voice, after a terrified hush had reigned for several minutes.
“We’ll freeze to death before we starve,” said Justice pessimistically, shivering until his teeth chattered.
“Nonsense!” said Katherine severely. “We’ll get out somehow. Sherry and Nyoda will find the stair landing open and will come after us,” she finished, and the rest shouted aloud, so great was their relief at the thought.
Then Justice struck them cold again with his next words. “No, they won’t find it open, because I closed it several times, but I left it closed. They’ll never find that spring in a million years.”
A groan of disappointment went up at his words and their hearts sank like lead.
“We’ll get out somehow,” repeated Katherine determinedly, after a minute. “We were shut up in a cave once before, and we got out all right.”
“Yes, but that time Slim and I were on the outside, not on the inside with you,” the Captain reminded her.
“Yes, and that time it wasn’t so cold,” said Sahwah, vainly trying to stop shivering, “and we had eaten so many strawberries that we could have lasted for days. I’m hungry already.”
“So’m I,” said Slim decidedly. “I’ve been hungry for an hour.”
“You’re always hungry,” said Justice impatiently. “I guess you’ll last as long as the rest of us, though.”
“Stop talking about ‘lasting,’” said Katherine with a shudder of something besides cold. “You give me the creeps.”
“If we only had something to break the door down with!” sighed Justice. “It would take a battering ram, though,” he finished hopelessly.
“Too bad Hercules’ old goat isn’t down here with us,” said Sahwah with a sudden reminiscent giggle. “He could have smashed the door down in no time with his forehead.”
“But he isn’t here, and we are,” remarked Slim gloomily.
“I wish now I’d waked Sylvia up and shown her the stair landing opening,” sighed Katherine regretfully. “She was so sound asleep, though, I couldn’t bear to waken her. If she only knew about it she could send Sherry after us!” Oh, the tragedy bound up in that little word “if”!
Then to add to their troubles the lantern began to burn out with a series of pale flashes, and Slim was so agitated about it that he dropped the biggest electric flashlight on the floor and put it out of commission. Katherine’s small pocket flash h
ad burned out some time before. That left only two small flashlights.
“Put them out,” directed Justice, “so they’ll last. We can flash them when we need a light.”
It was much worse, being there in the darkness. Sahwah and Katherine clung to each other convulsively and the boys instinctively moved nearer together. Conversation dropped off after a while and it seemed as if the silence of the tomb hovered over them. No sound came from any direction.
During another one of these silences, following a desperate outburst of shouting, a sound burst through the uncanny stillness. It was a slight sound, but to their strained nerves it was as startling as a cannon shot. It was merely a faint pat, pat, pat, coming from somewhere. They could not tell the direction, it was so far off.
“It’s footsteps!” said Sahwah, starting up wildly.
“No, it’s only water dropping,” said Justice, cupping his hand over his ear in an attempt to locate the direction of the sound. “I wonder where it can be.”
He flashed the light and looked for the dropping water, but failed to find it. He turned the light out again. Then in the darkness the sound seemed clearer than before—pat, pat, pat, pat.
“It’s getting louder,” said Katherine.
“It is footsteps!” cried Sahwah positively. “They’re coming nearer! Listen!”
The tapping noise increased until it became without a doubt the sound of a footfall drawing nearer along the passage on the other side of the cave.
“It’s Sherry looking for us; he’s found the passage!” shrieked Sahwah, “or maybe it’s Hercules!”
“Yell, everybody!” commanded Justice, “and let him know where we are.”
They set up a perfectly ear-splitting shout, and as the echoes died away they heard the snap of the lock on the other side of the door. Slim, who was nearest, flung himself upon the door handle and in another instant the door yielded under his hand and swung inward.
“Sherry!” they shouted, and crowded out into the passage, all talking at once.
“Sherry! Sherry! Where are you?” Sahwah called, suddenly aware that no one had answered them. Justice and the Captain sprang their flashlights and looked about them in astonishment. There was no one in the passage beside themselves.
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