CHAPTER XVII

A WONDERFUL DISCOVERY

Frank and Jack, when they left Harry near the entrance to the old channel, passed down the incline afterwards followed by their chum and presently came to the turn in the passage. Here they paused for a moment to take note of the situation, and then passed down another incline, much steeper than the other.

“The water must have been going some when it reached this point,” Frank suggested. “Put in one straight drop, these tunnels would make Niagara look like thirty cents.”

“I wish it had worn a little larger passage,” Jack complained, sourly, crawling head foremost into the narrow passage, his flashlight held in advance. “Wouldn’t it be fun seeing Gilroy trying to crowd through here,” he added. “You could hear him puff for a mile!”

This last steep incline brought the boys to quite a large chamber in the rock. Their lights showed glistening spots in the wall, and they naturally stepped to examine them.

“Gold!” shouted Jack in a moment.

“You bet it’s gold!” Frank declared. “I guess I know gold when I see it. Look at it all around us!”

“It is my firm belief,” Jack almost shouted, “that we have struck the mother lode! This is the spot where the gold that is washed out in the placers comes from. Don’t you think so?”

“It may be,” answered Frank, “and I don’t wonder that the corporations at war with your father’s company are fighting for this hill.”

“I don’t believe they even know this gold is here,” Jack suggested.

“They may not know of this special deposit of gold,” Frank continued, “but I’ll tell you right now that they do know of a lot of other deposits.”

“Yes,” Jack returned, “if they didn’t know there was gold here in plenty, they wouldn’t be putting up such a scrap for the possession of the land. Corporations don’t fight for stone piles.”

The boys looked over every foot of the chamber, estimating the amount of virgin gold in sight, and almost unconsciously looking for some evidence that the place had been visited before their arrival. Before long Frank stumbled over a slight obstruction on the level floor of the chamber, and almost fell to his knees.

“What the dickens is coming off here?” he shouted.

“Hush!” warned Jack. “What’s the use of asking the question of the wide, wide world? We don’t know who may be within sound of our voices.”

“One thing I do know,” Frank grumbled, “and that is that I just about busted my big toe! Now what do you suppose that is?”

He stooped as he spoke and lifted what seemed to be a very crude iron pick from the floor. It was nearly a foot in length, with two sharp points, and in the eye between the two, at the center of the implement, were the remains of a wooden handle, rotted away during long years of disuse. The boys eyed it curiously.

“How’s that for a prehistoric implement?” asked Jack.

“It looks as though it might be five thousand years old,” Frank answered, taking the implement into his hand.

“It looks to me,” Jack declared, “like one of the cave-dweller tools one sees in the Smithsonian Institute at Washington. The scientists declare that such implements were used in the crude mining carried on thousands of years ago. They also state that they were used for beating up Indian corn and refractory wives.”

“Anyway,” Frank laughed, “the presence of the tool here shows that this chamber was never formed by the action of the water. Those old duffers hewed this out, gathering gold, with just such tools as this.”

“And they probably found a good many pounds of gold in every square foot they dug out!” replied Jack.

“Then, look here,” Frank said, “if they hewed out this chamber, they built the dam over the old crevice which turned the water into this channel. Can you imagine a better way of concealing millions of dollars worth of gold? I guess they were next to their jobs, all right!”

“I’ll tell you what it is,” Jack laughed, “when we get back to New York and tell Dad what we’ve discovered, he ought to buy us a transcontinental railroad apiece. We’ve earned it all right!”

Frank looked back toward the narrow incline, and again cast his searchlight over the chamber, which now seemed to them to be a perfect treasure house of virgin gold.

“Did it ever occur to you,” he said grimly, “that we’ve got to get out of this mess before we get back to New York?”

“Yes,” Jack replied, “and we’ve got to make our way out through the continuation of this passage. We couldn’t crawl back up that steep passage in a thousand years!”

“And Harry lays back there with a broken arm,” Jack added ruefully. “We should have taken the time to give the boy a little ‘first-aid’ before we started out on this excursion. He must be suffering.”

“Then the thing for us to do now is to keep plugging along until we get out into God’s free air again. If we can get out ourselves, we can go back to camp and get a coil of rope and boost Harry out over the edge of the pit. We never could get him through this tunnel anyway.”

“That’s the ticket!” Jack answered.

A narrow opening led from the chamber in which the boys had discovered the gold, and they followed this for a short distance only to find themselves confronted by a solid wall of rock. The tunnel seemed to end there!

“Now,” questioned Frank, “how did the water find its way out of this contraption? There must be a channel somewhere.”

Jack lowered his electric to the floor of the passage and then looked up to his chum with positive fright showing in his face.

“It went plumb down into a hole in the rock!” he said. “Here’s the hole and it isn’t large enough for a good sized terrier to crawl through.”

“Talk about getting up against the real thing!” grumbled Frank.

“Now you just wait a minute,” Jack suggested. “There’s a current of air here that doesn’t come through the passage by which we entered. It blows directly from the north.”

Eagerly the boys turned their lights toward the north wall.

“Here you are!” Frank shouted in a moment. “There’s another passage here and it’s been blocked up with stones! The cement with which the stones were sealed has dropped away, and the wind is coming through the cracks. This mine has been worked, all right!”

“What’s the matter with pulling the stones down?” asked Jack. “We ought to be able to do that.”

The boys brought all their strength to bear on one of the topmost stones, and it fell with a crash into the passage.

They were about to put their hands to another rock when Jack uttered an exclamation of alarm and drew Frank away.

“This seems to be the haunted mine all right!” the boy whispered, “There’s a light beyond this wall!”

Frank put his eye to the aperture, gave one look into the interior, and then sprang away.

“It’s a wood fire, too!” he whispered. “And there are half a dozen as ugly looking gnomes as you ever saw sitting around it. They must have heard us talking, or heard the stone when it fell, for they are looking this way. It seems to me,” he went on, “that this is one of the quietest little Boy Scout expeditions anyone ever heard of!”

“Shall we try the back passage?” asked Jack.

“We’ve got to try it!” Frank replied. “At least, we’ve got to get so far away from this chamber that they won’t see us if they come and look through the hole we made in the wall.”

“The danger is,” Jack decided, “that they have seen our lights or heard our voices. In that case, here are two Boy Scouts who won’t be apt to get out of the tunnel for a few hundred years.”

The heavy tread of footsteps and the sound of guttural voices speaking in a tongue with which the boys were unfamiliar were now heard on the other side of the broken wall, and the boys switched off their lights and started resolutely up the steep grade by means of which they had reached the spot. It was hard climbing and they made slow progress.

While they struggled up the hard slope, after passing the gold chamber, lights flashed in the darkness behind them and they lay flat on their faces, expecting every moment to hear the sounds of determined pursuit.

But the men who had been seen about the fire did not advance beyond the gold chamber. The boys heard them talking together for a moment, and then the sound of their voices died out.

“I guess they’ve gone back!” ventured Frank.

“I don’t believe they have,” replied Jack. “It’s just this way, you see,” he went on, “they would naturally expect to find a current of running water passing through the chamber. Well, we shut the water off, didn’t we? That, of itself, will render them suspicious, and they’ll keep up their investigation until they find the cause of the change in the stream. I only hope they won’t get up to the vicinity of the pit and find Harry before we get back to him!”

Stopping frequently to rest, the boys crawled on up the incline until they came to the angle which led to the first steep passage they had negotiated. By this time, their hands were bleeding from contact with the rough rocks, their breath was coming in short gasps.

Once around the angle, however, they stopped and lay motionless for a moment. Then Frank turned the eye of his searchlight upward. What he saw at the head of the incline caused him to grasp his companion fiercely by the shoulder and point with a trembling finger.

“If that isn’t a ghost up there,” he said, “it is Harry!”

“We never left Harry as far in the hill as that!” Jack suggested.

“Then it’s a ghost!” Frank insisted. “Anyway, there’s some one up there. I can’t see the whole figure, but I saw a white face for just an instant. It must be Harry!”

“Up we go, then!” Jack exclaimed.

The boys were not long kept in doubt as to the identity of the figure they had seen at the top of the incline. Before they had proceeded half a dozen paces, an electric light flashed out, and they saw Harry, evidently startled by the noise of their approach, looking toward them.

“It’s Harry, all right!” Jack said. “But that isn’t where we left him. He must have crawled down alone.”

“Perhaps there’s been a mixup on the outside,” Frank suggested.

The whispered conversation was interrupted by a soft call from above. The boys recognized the voice of their chum.

“Frank!” Harry whispered.

“All right!” Frank answered.

“Don’t make too much noise,” Jack suggested. “We’ve just made the discovery that the heart of this stony old mountain is inhabited.”

“Inhabited?” repeated Harry.

“That same!” answered Frank, dropping to the ground at the place where Harry sat. “It’s inhabited, and the inhabitants seem to be averse to our efforts as missionaries.”

The boys talked in low tones for a moment before Harry referred to the arrival of Ned and Jimmie. The excitement over the possible pursuit was so great that even this most important event was overlooked!

“Suppose they follow us up here!” Jack said in a breath. “We haven’t got any more guns than a rabbit!”

“Ned and Jimmie have guns,” Harry replied.

“Ned and Jimmie?” repeated both boys.

“Sure!” answered Harry. “You scared me so with your talk of mountain gnomes that I forgot to tell you that Ned and Jimmie came into the pit by way of a hempen elevator.”

“Where are they now?” asked Frank.

“They went out to see what the shooting was about!”

The two boys who had arisen to their feet at mention of their chums’ names now dropped flat on the rock.

“I’d like to know what else is coming off here tonight!” Frank exclaimed. “There’s a herd of cave dwellers chasing us up from behind, and a party of half-breeds trying to shoot us up from in front. Tell you what I’m going to do,” he went on, “I’m going to become a disciple of Gilroy. As soon as I get back to little old New York, I’m going to stay there!”