you can't make out nothing most of the time--nothing important. But
they's ways of smelling things, and the smell of this here tunnel ain't
too good to me. Look again and try to pry down that tunnel with your
flash light, Jerry."

Accordingly Jerry raised his little pocket electric torch and held it
above his head. They saw a tunnel opening, with raw dirt walls and floor
and a rude framing of heavy timbers to support the roof. But it turned
an angle and went out of view in a very few paces.

"Go down there with your lantern and look for the exit," said Ronicky
Doone. "I'll stay back here and see that we get our farewell all fixed
up."

The damp cellar air seemed to affect the throat of the fat man. He
coughed heavily.

"Say, Ronicky," said Jerry Smith, "looks to me that you're carrying this
pretty far. Let's take a chance on what we've got ahead of us?"

The fat man was chuckling: "You show a touching trust in me, Mr. Doone."

Ronicky turned on him with an ugly sneer. "I don't like you, Fernand,"
he said. "They's nothing about you that looks good to me. If I knew half
as much as I guess about you I'd blow your head off, and go on without
ever thinking about you again. But I don't know. Here you've got me up
against it. We're going to go down that tunnel; but, if it's blind,
Fernand, and you trap us from this end, it will be the worst day of your
life."

"Take this passage, Doone, or turn around and come back with me, and
I'll show some other ways of getting out--ways that lie under the open
sky, Doone. Would you like that better? Do you want starlight and John
Mark--or a little stretch of darkness, all by yourself?" asked Fernand.

Ronicky Doone studied the face of Fernand, almost wistfully. The more he
knew about the fellow the more thoroughly convinced he was that Fernand
was bad in all possible ways. He might be telling the truth now,
however--again he might be simply tempting him on to a danger. There was
only one way to decide. Ronicky, a gambler himself, mentally flipped a
coin and nodded to Jerry.

"We'll go in," he said, "but man, man, how my old scars are pricking!"

They walked into the moldy, damp air of the tunnel, reached the corner,
and there the passage turned and ended in a blank wall of raw dirt, with
a little apron of fallen debris at the bottom of it. Ronicky Doone
walked first, and, when he saw the passage obstructed in this manner, he
whirled like a flash and fired at the mouth of the tu