hunder's got him?" Stud felt his
own breath blow hot and cold together, but--this crucial moment it came
back to him--the eyes of a girl out there had driven it home, with blue
lightnings, that he did not _have_ to defy his teeth.

"Humph! I'm no quitter," he told the piloting breast-ray, blazing its
ruby trail ahead. "Well-ll! for the love of Mike! Well! what do you know
about that?... What have we h-here?"

In answer to his gasping snort, as he gaped and gasped there in the
darkness, the little safety lamp told him what it made of it--of the
staggering sight--it made a pair of big feet in rough cowhide boots
tightly wedged by the ankles in a buckling switch of rock where two
sharp, narrow ridges that formed the bottom of the Tinker's Pot
dovetailed into each other,--after the manner of rails at a switch.

Ruddy, the slipslop explorer, had gone in heels over head, so to speak.
He was hanging by the heels now. Nothing visible of him but those
pinioned feet!

"_Hea-vens!_ he did strike a blind bargain. S-such a snag! The
passage ends here. A drop! A--blank--fall of rock! Gee-ee!"

Dank--dank as cave-tears now was the moisture upon Stud's forehead. For
the first time his teeth almost chattered. What would he see when he
held the lamp over the edge of the Tinker's Pot into the horror of that
empty space beyond where the passage broadened into blankness and the
rock shelved sharply down? A dead boy? Or one so far gone from hanging
that he could not be rescued?

At the first sight of those wedged feet he had felt inclined to laugh.
Now he was laughing at the wrong side of his mouth, as he peeped over
the brink.

"Oh-h! the rock _isn't_ perpendicular; it slants down, though,
pretty sharply--down into an inner cave--by gracious! And Ruddy, the way
he's hanging his nose, is within an inch or two o' the floor of that
other cave!... And, yet, he's helpless! Helpless as if he had a halter
round his neck! Oh-h! if some of the other fellows were here."

But Stud did not seem to be quite alone; he was one and a half; for the
hearts of two girls were pendent from _his_ neck; outside he knew
they were backing him,--praying for him.

Also, that frenzied gurgle from the victim's throat, his choking cry as
the light struck him, the squirming body and up-rolling eyes told the
boy scout that he was just in time; although the foam was pink upon
Ruddy's lips and his congested head was a fire-ball, indeed,--that brash
head with all