, that
hung as fine as fur.

Radcliffe, retracing his steps, (with the aid of the twine ball), till he
came to the cross roads, as it were, turned to the left and forged ahead
with his carbide lamp, treading softly as a cougar, with revolver cocked
in his right hand. Ever and anon he stopped breath-still to listen.

Passing through the same alabaster cavern that had so impressed the
Spanish boy, his eye caught the bandanna Pedro had dropped in the
left-hand passageway. With an inward exclamation, he hurried on till he
had reached the end of the blind. Stooping with his lamp, he could see
the fresh scratches their feet had made. Darting back to the turn of the
tunnel, where he had picked up the bandanna, he took the only choice left
to him, the right hand way, with all the satisfaction of a hound on the
scent. More scratches on the sandstone floor assured him that they had
really gone this way, instead of turning back the way they had come, and
presently he too was standing in the gallery of the sloping floor and
yellowed pillars, at whose far end the dripstone cataract hung, turned to
soundless stone. But of the three Mexicans and Pedro there was no trace.

"I say, when do we eat?" Ace was just beginning, when the floor suddenly
gave way beneath him, and he fell down a ten foot well, landing on all
fours, in Stygian blackness. And no sooner had his bulk padded the stone
beneath than Ted came, plunk! almost on top of him.

At the moment both were slightly stunned. Their candle flames had of
course been flicked out. Then Ted reached mechanically for his matches,
by whose flare he found his hat, and still firmly stuffed into the band,
his candles. The light disclosed a cavern with muddy walls dripping above
them, and to their right, an inky pool of water. The air was all aflutter
with the bats they had startled from their pendant slumbers, lizards
scuttled away in all directions, and a fish flopped in the pool, with a
splash that sounded out of all proportion to its exciting cause. Ted
grinned as he saw Ace first pinch himself to see if he were dreaming,
then slowly feel his joints to make sure none were seriously damaged.

The fall had rather jolted his nerves, but otherwise he was unhurt, as
was his chum. But how to return the way they had come they could not see,
for the walls were too slippery to climb, there was not a spear of
anything movable in sight on which they might gain a foothold, and when
Ted tried it fro