bluff, but
little below the level of the ground and easy of entrance. It was cool
and damp, but, with the daylight through the doorway, it was merely
shadowy inside. In the farther wall yawned the ragged opening to the
black spaces leading off underground. Through this opening these two
had crept once, feeling that behind the wall somebody was crouching
with evil intent. They peered through the opening now, trying to see the
miraculous way by which they had come into the cave from the rear.
But they stared only into blackness and caught the breath of the damp
underground air with a faint odor of wood smoke somewhere.

"Elinor, it's a good thing we came through here in the night. It would
have been maddening to be forced in here by daylight. We must have
slipped down through a hole somewhere in our stumbles and hit a passage
leading out of here only to the river, a sort of fire escape by way of
the waters. You remember we couldn't get anywhere on the back track,
except to the cliff above the Walnut. It's all very fine if the escaper
gets out of the river before he reaches Lagonda's whirlpool."

He was leaning far through the opening in the wall, gazing into the
darkness and seeing nothing.

"Somewhere back in there, while I was pawing around that night, I found
something up in a chink that felt like the odd-shaped little silver
pitcher my mother had once--an old family heirloom, lost or stolen some
time ago. I came back and hunted for it later, but it was winter time
and cold as the grave outside and darker in here, and I couldn't find
anything, so I concluded maybe I was mistaken altogether about its being
like that old pitcher of ours. It was a bad night for 'seein' things';
it might have been for 'feelin' things' as well. There's nothing here
but damp air and darkness."

And even while he was speaking close beside the wall, so near that a
hand could have reached him, a man was crouching; the same man whose
cruel eyes had stared through the bushes at Lloyd Fenneben as he sat by
the river before Pigeon Place; the same man whose eyes had leered at Vic
Burleigh in this same place eighteen months before; the same man whom
little Bug Buler's innocent face had startled as he was about to seize
the money box at the gateway to the Sunrise football field; and this
same man was crouching now to spring at Vic Burleigh's throat in the
darkness.

"It's a good thing a fellow has a guardian angel once in a while," Vic
said, as