And--with that--there was the rasp of a third "niggling" match, faintly-heard, far in, a momentary reflection, a tiny glance-coal, in the fissure's leering mouth! And--and, following that, a shriek!

A shriek, headlong, sinking and pitching--dying like a falling star, as if some clutch were stifling it.

"Hea-vens!" The girls, blanching, shrank against the opposite cave-wall, which shuddered behind them.

A bat, flying low, a winged Fear, brushed Tanpa's cheek, as she stood, transfixed,--and her cry was almost as hysterical as theirs.

In the blackness of that Tinker's Pot behind the looming fissure, were there other things--other things besides a boy, a broken braggart of a boy?

Was Death in the pot with him? Had he sipped of its mystery--only to perish? Death--it seemed a raving possibility--in the shape of some wild animal, perhaps--a live, a clutching claw!

Tales were always current among the mountains, trappers' tales--and most of them airy "traveler's yarns", too--of strange tracks seen in lonely spots, of lynx and bobcat; and even of the young and roving panther.

To be sure, a three-cornered tunnel, the second floor back of a lofty cave, would be the last place to look for such an ambush, unless there was some fly-trap opening to it from above. But there might be!

Boys and girls, both, their blood flamed upon the fear, then froze--until the silence, the bat-churned cave silence, was hung with icicles above them.

Then, once more, it was ripped from on top by that perishing shriek--pa.s.sing strange, remote--but now it was as if the fissure's three-cornered mouth filled with it, faintly gibbered the one word: "C-caught!"

"'_Caught!_' Oh! Stud, you warned him; it's his own doing. Let those other two boys--his friends--climb up to him! Well--if you feel--you--must?"

Jessie's cry gibbered in agony in her throat, too, liquid as the thrush-tone in terror for its mate. But it struck a high note at the end.

For Stud's hand was groping mechanically for the bright little lamp above his forehead, as if for inspiration, his left for the lariat at his waist, in defiance of his threat that the desperado in the "pot"

might have tears in his eyes before he would help him.

But there was something worse than cave-tears in question now--of that Studart felt sure.

And Pem, watching,--Jessie, too--caught from an entering shaft of day-light which shivered as if aghast, the reflection of the tightening glow upon his young face--the waggish features of the Henkyl Hunter!

And she recognized it, by the feeling of her stiff, cold cheeks, as she clapped her hands to them--did Toandoah's little chum--for the glow which had electrified her own when she fought her way out of a swamped Pullman, saving her friend, driving it into the teeth of the flood, and of the World, too, that neither her father's honor, nor his invention--nor anything he ever turned out--was a Quaker gun; letting fly with it faintly at a rescuing youth, too, when she bade him "take Una first."

For by that glow as by an altar-lamp, in whose gleam she had worshiped before she saw as the strong boy's hand went automatically to his equipment that lamp and lariat were nothing--nothing--"without the heart of a Scout!"

CHAPTER XIV

STOUTHEART

"W-wedged!... Wedged!"

Now--now it was another word which jabbered faintly in the dark fissure's mouth! A girl caught it--or thought she did.

"_Wedged!_" she echoed wildly. "Caught! Oh, maybe--maybe--there's nothing in there but Ruddy himself!"

"Maybe--so!" Stud panted heavily while, across an inner, gaping hollow, the next words took a giant stride to his lips: "Anyhow--I'm going up!"

"Oh--Studley!" But beyond this one faint cry, Jessie, stanch little partner,--the girl behind the lines,--said no more to hinder him now, as she watched the scout detach his little lamp from his hatbrim and hook it on to his khaki breast.

With it glowing there, a headlight for his gallant heart, Stud set himself to climb. Standing upon the shoulders of two brother scouts, in his belt a club s.n.a.t.c.hed from one of them, he reached the lowest point of the tapering fissure.

"Ha! There he goes, in spite of his teeth," tremored a younger boy.

"His teeth aren't chattering!" Pem's eyes--lightning-blue--hurled back the charge.

The denial rang in Stud's ears as he thrust his head into the black opening, entering, amidships, as the former muddle-headed explorer had done.

"That girl's a trump--the girl with eyes the color of the little 'heal-all', that blue flower we pick up here in May! A trump! But so's little Jess, too!"

Thus did Stoutheart, a knight of to-day, pay tribute to the world he left behind him, when he felt in his exploring knees, now creeping along the bottom of the Tinker's Pot, that there was a chance of his leaving it behind forever.

"I don't see what else he _could_ have done," said Tanpa, the Guardian, her fingers hysterically interlocking. "Somebody had to go up; and he's the oldest boy--a Patrol Leader. But, oh! I wish my husband were here. Run and meet him, a couple of you!" She glanced appealingly at the scouts. "Oh! do--and hurry him back--back from the spring."

Meanwhile Stud had forgotten even his backers in the feminine hearts below and was banking all on just one trusty ally--the headlight on his breast.

"Without the light, the little safety lamp, I couldn't do-o it," he told himself. "Gee! but it is as black in here as Erebus, a Tinker's Pot, indeed--the blindest pa.s.sage--blindest bargain--I ever struck! So--so sharp underneath, too!"

Yes, difficulty masked was in the "bargain", yet he crept on over tapering ridges of rock that now and again buckled like teeth. But he knew by the parched sound of his own voice, as he shouted a question, that his courage might have ended in smoke, there and then, if it weren't for the little lamp at his breast.

So rosily it burned now, in here, that its feeding oil seemed the red blood of his heart!

"Anyhow--anyhow, with it, I'll be able to see which way the cat jumps!"

Here, Stoutheart more tightly gripped the club; the last words might prove more than mere figure of speech.

From ahead came strange, gurgling, choking sounds, rising from somewhere--growing weaker.

"Where--where are you, Ruddy? Answer! R-rap--rap out something, if you can!" he adjured.

And it was--truly--a rapping reply that reached him; a queer, hollow knocking at the door of some throat that semed shutting.

"My word! What on earth ... what in thunder's got him?" Stud felt his own breath blow hot and cold together, but--this crucial moment it came back to him--the eyes of a girl out there had driven it home, with blue lightnings, that he did not _have_ to defy his teeth.

"Humph! I'm no quitter," he told the piloting breast-ray, blazing its ruby trail ahead. "Well-ll! for the love of Mike! Well! what do you know about that?... What have we h-here?"

In answer to his gasping snort, as he gaped and gasped there in the darkness, the little safety lamp told him what it made of it--of the staggering sight--it made a pair of big feet in rough cowhide boots tightly wedged by the ankles in a buckling switch of rock where two sharp, narrow ridges that formed the bottom of the Tinker's Pot dovetailed into each other,--after the manner of rails at a switch.

Ruddy, the slipslop explorer, had gone in heels over head, so to speak.

He was hanging by the heels now. Nothing visible of him but those pinioned feet!

"_Hea-vens!_ he did strike a blind bargain. S-such a snag! The pa.s.sage ends here. A drop! A--blank--fall of rock! Gee-ee!"

Dank--dank as cave-tears now was the moisture upon Stud's forehead. For the first time his teeth almost chattered. What would he see when he held the lamp over the edge of the Tinker's Pot into the horror of that empty s.p.a.ce beyond where the pa.s.sage broadened into blankness and the rock shelved sharply down? A dead boy? Or one so far gone from hanging that he could not be rescued?

At the first sight of those wedged feet he had felt inclined to laugh.