th in the fissure's grinning mouth--darkness followed!

Two or three of the boy scouts--those who did not, like Stud, show
incredulity, sarcasm gleaming, hawk-eyed, from a ruby lamp hooked to a
hatband, and from a level eye beneath it--held their breath, dazzled;
for the moment beaten at their own brave game of exploring.

So did the girl who had been piqued and dared into sitting in the
Devil's Chair--with a sheer abyss beneath her!

Again did her wide-open, staring eyes, under their black lashes, sport a
Blue Peter, the flag of adventure.

"Oh! he's plucky, anyhow. I wonder what he'll find in there?" her palms
were laid together upon a spicy filling of excitement. "He really is
daring--awfully daring, you know!"

"Ha! Courage cobweb-weed!" muttered Stud laconically. "Well--well, he'll
have tears in his eyes before I go after him!"

And--with that--there was the rasp of a third "niggling" match,
faintly-heard, far in, a momentary reflection, a tiny glance-coal, in
the fissure's leering mouth! And--and, following that, a shriek!

A shriek, headlong, sinking and pitching--dying like a falling star, as
if some clutch were stifling it.

"Hea-vens!" The girls, blanching, shrank against the opposite cave-wall,
which shuddered behind them.

A bat, flying low, a winged Fear, brushed Tanpa's cheek, as she stood,
transfixed,--and her cry was almost as hysterical as theirs.

In the blackness of that Tinker's Pot behind the looming fissure, were
there other things--other things besides a boy, a broken braggart of a
boy?

Was Death in the pot with him? Had he sipped of its mystery--only to
perish? Death--it seemed a raving possibility--in the shape of some wild
animal, perhaps--a live, a clutching claw!

Tales were always current among the mountains, trappers' tales--and most
of them airy "traveler's yarns", too--of strange tracks seen in lonely
spots, of lynx and bobcat; and even of the young and roving panther.

To be sure, a three-cornered tunnel, the second floor back of a lofty
cave, would be the last place to look for such an ambush, unless there
was some fly-trap opening to it from above. But there might be!

Boys and girls, both, their blood flamed upon the fear, then
froze--until the silence, the bat-churned cave silence, was hung with
icicles above them.

Then, once more, it was ripped from on top by that perishing
shriek--passing strange, remote--but now it was as if the fissure's
three-cornered mouth f