oyance, sprang
down upon the ledge after me. I had a feeling that he must
certainly trip me as I picked my way gingerly along.

An angle in the rock--a low dark entrance-way--it was all as Peter
had described it. I peered in--nothing but impenetrable blackness.
I took a hesitating step. The passage veered sharply, as the diary
had recorded. Once around the corner, there would be nothing but
darkness anywhere. One would go stumbling on, feeling with feet
and hands--hands cold with the dread of what they might be going to
touch. For, suddenly portentous and overwhelming, there rose
before me the unanswered question of what had become of Peter on
that last visit to the cave. Unanswered--and unanswerable except
in one way: by going in to see.

But if by any strange chance--where all chances were strange--he
were still there, I did not want to see. I did not like to
contemplate his possible neighborhood. Indeed, he grew enormously
more real to me with every instant I stood there, and whereas I had
so far thought principally about the treasure, I now began to think
with intensity of Peter. What ironic stroke of fate had cut him
down in the very moment of his triumph? Had he ever reached the
cave to bring away the last of the doubloons? Were they
still waiting there unclaimed? Had he fallen victim to some
extraordinary mischance on the way back to the _Island Queen_? Had
a storm come up on that last night, and the weakened cable parted,
and the _Island Queen_ gone on the rocks, drowning Peter in the
cabin with his gold? Then how had Crusoe got away, Crusoe, who
feared the waves so, and would bark at them and then turn tail and
run?

Speaking of Crusoe, where was he? I realized that a moment ago he
had plunged into the passage. I heard the patter of his feet--a
pause. A queer, dismal little whine echoed along the passage. I
heard Crusoe returning--but before his nose appeared around the
angle of the tunnel, his mistress had reached the top of the cliff
at a bound and was vanishing at a brisk pace into the woods.

With bitterness, as I pursued my way to camp, I realized that I was
not a heroine. Here was a mystery--it was the business of a
heroine to solve it. Now that I was safely away from the cave, I
began to feel the itch of a torturing curiosity. How, without
going into the terrifying place alone, should I find out what was
there? Should I pretend to have accidentally discovered the grave,
lead