The Camp Fire Girls Solve a Mystery Or The Christmas Adventure at Carver House Part 12

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 mola.s.ses 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 compa.s.s, a section of a hawser, a heavy iron chain, deeply rusted, a pocket telescope, a bra.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sing in review, with the secret pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage by which they had entered the cave another pa.s.sage opened, or rather, a continuation of the first one, for the cave was merely a widening out of this subterranean tunnel.

"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 pa.s.sage.

The door was just like the one beside the ladder in Carver House; tremendously heavy, bound in bra.s.s 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 k.n.o.b 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 pa.s.sage.

"The pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage was blocked by a huge stone that had fallen out of the wall.

It filled up the s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sage 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 n.o.body 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.