d he squeezed his portly person out between the flapping boards.

"All the same, I shall be glad to see him again," Jones declared, with
an anxious frown upon his usually _nonchalant_ countenance; and the two
men started briskly down the hill in pursuit of "the team."

Meanwhile, Mr. Fetherbee was making his way slowly and cautiously down
the rope. It was a good stout one and he had no real misgivings. Yet the
situation was unusual enough to have a piquant flavor. In the first
place the darkness was more than inky in character, the kind of
blackness in comparison with which the blackest night seems luminous.
Then there was the peculiar quality of the air, so different from
anything above ground, that the words chill, and dampness, had no
special relation to it. In the strange, tomb-like silence, his own
breath, his own movements, waked a ghostly, whispering echo which was
extremely weird and suggestive. Mr. Fetherbee was enchanted. He felt
that he was getting down into the mysterious heart of things; that he
was having something which came within an ace of being an adventure.
Then, as he felt his way down, farther and farther below the vain
surface of things, that intervening ace vanished, and he came up against
his adventure with a suddenness that sent a knife-like thrill to his
heart. His foot had lost its hold of the rope; he was hanging by his
hands only.

Startled into what he condemned as an unreasoning agitation, he began
describing a circle with his leg, searching for the lost rope. It must
be there, of course; why, of course it must! He had certainly not gone
more than fifty or sixty feet, and they had said something about three
hundred feet? Where could the rope be? It must have got caught somehow
on his coat! Or perhaps his right leg was getting numb and he could not
feel anything with it. But no! His leg was all right. He felt out with
his left leg. It did not even touch the wall of the shaft. There seemed
to be nothing there, nothing at all! Nothing there? Nothing in all the
universe, but this bit of rope he was clutching, and himself, a
miserable little lump of quivering, straining nerves.

Mr. Fetherbee told himself that this would never do. He loosed the grip
of his left hand, and it felt its way slowly down the rope gathering it
up inch by inch. He knew by the lightness of the rope that the end was
there, yet when he touched it a shiver went through him. A second later
the left hand was clutching the