CHAPTER III.

"I WILL BE BACK."

By this time the loafers about Hollow Tree were thoroughly alive to the situation, and Little Snap imagined that Robin Burrnock was looking on with great satisfaction.

"Of course there was!" exclaimed the excited Shag. "What hev ye done with it, you young scamp?"

"What do you think I have done with it, Mr. Shag?" demanded Little Snap, fearlessly. "If it is not there now, I know no more where it is than you do."

"Say I have taken it, do yer?" cried Shag, fiercely. "Ye shall eat 'em words, boy."

"That's it, Dan!" broke in one of the spectators, a big, red-whiskered bushbinder. "If ye want enny help, call on me.

"Reckon I can handle sich a leetle ginger bub es he," replied the postmaster. "Here's the sack; see if the Hollow Tree package is there fer yerself."

Little Snap was standing by the side of Jack, and about six feet from the entrance to the Hollow Tree. Bidding the horse to remain quiet, he entered the opening, upon the bottom of which lay the mail pouch.

Giving this a kick toward him, Shag returned to his retreat behind a barrier of poles with which the inclosure had been partitioned off.

"It is not here," said Little Snap, when he had hastily examined the small amount of mail matter left in the pouch.

"Then where is it?"

"I do not know."

"I should like to know if it isn't your bizness to know? I shall take the trouble to report yer at headquarters. It isn't th' fust time I have missed letters, though I hev waited to git dead evidence agin' yer afore I blowed.

"Boys, I call on yer to prove thet he 'lows th' Hollow Tree mail ain't here."

"P'raps he's got yit 'bout his duds," ventured Robin Burrnock.

"S'arch him," exclaimed one of the speaker's companions.

The four started forward as if they would carry out the intention.

Little Snap had picked up the sack, and, with it lying across his left arm, stood in the opening answering for a doorway to the "office."

The quartet stopped suddenly in their advance, either lacking the courage to attack the determined boy, or waiting for an order from the postmaster to do so.

"It's no use for us to git mixed up in th' muss," said the latter, directly. "He's under Uncle Sam; but ye can count on me to report him in short meter."

Without replying, Little Snap threw the pouch over Jack's back and fastened it to a ring in the pommel of the saddle. Then, while the five looked on in silence, he sprang into his seat.

"This is only th' beginnin' o' th' end," said Dan Shag, shaking his fist after the departing postboy.

The country, after leaving the Hollow Tree, was less broken, the post road winding through a desolate region, thinly populated, and often lonely in the extreme.

While trying in his mind to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the Hollow Tree mail, Little Snap allowed Jack to take his own gait, until the Greenbrier River had been reached and he had passed over the pole bridge.

"It is hardly possible that Budd Grass dropped it when she sorted the mail at her office, though it is not very likely," he thought. "I will speak to her about it to-morrow. But if she did do that, she has found it before this and sent it on to Hollow Tree. Of course it will come out all right, for I can't see as I am to blame. At any rate, I expect more trouble from those Burrnocks than from the loss of that mail. What can be on foot among the bushbinders? I have it! Perhaps some of them stole the missing mail! But, how?"

Jack quickened his pace, and, naturally light-hearted, his rider was putting the thoughts of his late adventures from his mind, when a sharp voice called upon him to stop, while a wild, elfish-looking figure sprang suddenly into the middle of the road at the imminent risk of being trampled under the feet of the post horse.

"Hello!" exclaimed Little Snap, reining in Jack, with an abruptness which threw the creature back upon its haunches. "What is the trouble? and how is it you throw yourself under my horse's very feet?"

"Oh, mister! father is lost! Jim is gone, too! An' we can't find Fenn. So come with me—quick!"

The speaker was a girl of thirteen or fourteen, who would not have been bad looking had it not been for the coatings of tan and dirt masking her pinched face. She was quite tall for her age, with a slender figure clothed in a gingham gown several sizes too large for her. Her head and feet were bare, except for the thick covering of dirt on the latter and the heavy mat of brown hair on the former.

She was fearfully excited over something, and while she spoke she sawed the air with her long arms in a frantic manner.

"What has happened?" asked the postboy, in genuine alarm.

"Oh, dad and the boys are gone!"

"Gone where? Calm yourself, and then tell me what you want."

"I can't stop. Mebbe they are killing now! They crawled into that dark place, and they ain't never come out. Ye must go with me!" and she caught hold of Little Snap's arms, nearly pulling him from his seat.

I don't understand you. Stop right where you are until you can begin at the beginning and tell me what has happened. Who are you?"

I'm Tag Raggles, and me and my folks have jess come from Little Forks, and was going to the Blazed Acres. We stopped jess ayont here, when, seeing a big, black hole in the ground, dad 'lowed it mought lead somewhere. So he crawled inter it; but he ain't come back! Jim went arter him, and he ain't got back. Fenn, he went arter 'em, and he ain't come back. Marm got scared well nigh to death, and she sent me down here to hail the fust person to go past. You'll come with me, mister?"

"I can't stop. Don't be alarmed about them; they will come back all right in a short time. No doubt they have come before this."

"No, no! Marm and me hollered and hollered, but it weren't any good. I 'lowed I weren't afraid to go in there, but marm, she wouldn't let me. She's erbout crazy. You must go with me. It's only a little way, and you can ride up there on your hoss if you want ter."

As much as he disliked to lose the time, Little Snap felt that it was his duty to go to the assistance of the bereaved family. There could be no deception in the girl's action. She was too much in earnest for that.

"You will go?"

"Yes; lead the way."

Her face brightened, as with a low exclamation of delight, she bounded away from the road along a faintly defined path leading into the depths of the wilderness.

At intervals Little Snap saw the marks of wheel tracks in the sparsely grown sward, and the footprints of oxen's feet occasionally were to be seen.

Presently, when he had begun to think he had gone far enough, they entered a clearing in the growth near to the banks of a small stream, which flowed on toward the Greenbrier.

On the farther side of this valley the postboy discovered a white-topped wagon drawn up in the shadows of the forest, while a short distance away a pair of cattle lazily clipped the long grass.

But he quickly turned from these, as a tall, slatternly-dressed woman of uncertain age advanced swiftly from the base of bluff overlooking the northern side of the opening, saying, in an excited tone:

"Yer found one, Tag. I'm so glad yer hev come, sir. It's a desprit fix we air all in."

Though her explanation was hardly more easily understood than the girl's had been, Little Snap learned that soon after her family had stopped in the valley for a rest in their journey, her husband had discovered the entrance to a cavern, and curious to know where it led, he had crawled into the opening, but did not return.

Growing anxious over his long absence, her oldest boy, man grown, had followed his father, without giving any sign of his fate. In great excitement by this time, the second son had gone after his father and brother, and, like the others, nothing more had been seen or heard of him.

"It is terrible!" moaned the woman, wringing her hands. "They must be dead, and I am left here alone in this wilderness with these three little girls. Isn't there anything you can do?"

Little Snap had begun to examine the mouth of the cave, but as far as he could look in he could only see the rugged walls of the narrow passage leading gradually downward into the earth until lost in the darkness of the underground retreat.

The opening was about two by three feet, and had been concealed by overhanging bushes.

"I thought a bad smell kem from th' place," said the woman. "Perhaps they were stifled by gas. I have heard of sich things."

"Or been eat up by snakes," said Tag Raggles.

Thrusting his head and shoulders into the gloomy recess, Little Snap shouted at the top of his voice to the missing men, but only the hollow echoes of his cries, which seemed to reverberate from a long distance away, answered him.

"Thet ain't enny use, fer I hev hollered till I'm hoarse," declared Mrs. Raggles, the tears coursing down her thin cheeks, while she wrung her hands in the abandon of her grief. "Durst ye go in there, mister?"

"Yes; I am going," replied the postboy, preparing to enter the mysterious place.

"Do be careful," implored Mrs. Raggles. "You won't be gone long, will you?"

"I will be back in a few minutes—if I come at all. I shall——"

Little Snap's speech ended with a startling exclamation.