The Camp Fire Girls Solve a Mystery; Or, The Christmas Adventure at Carver House
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.
"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 had 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