warning
growl. It meant as plainly as though he had spoken in so many words:
"Stay where you are and I don't care in the least what you do, but don't
try to cross this entrance if you fear the length of my teeth and the
keenness thereof." And she did fear them, very much, for she remembered
the gashes across the back and the terrible rips up the side, of the
dead Maltese cat.

She even took a little heart, after a time. A grownup cannot feel terror
or grief as keenly as a child, but neither does terror or grief pass
away a tithe as fast. She seemed at liberty to roam about in the cave
as long as she did not go near the entrance, and now the shadows and the
dimness no longer frightened her. Nothing was terrible except that long,
dark body which lay across the entrance to the cave, and she finally got
to her feet and began to explore. She came first on a quantity of dead
grass heaped in a corner that was where Satan was stalled, no doubt, and
it made all the cave seem almost homelike. She found, too, a number of
stones grouped together with ashes in the hollow circle-that was where
the fires were built, and there to the side lay the pile of dead wood. A
little down the cave and directly in the center of the top, she next
saw the natural aperture where the smoke must escape and last of all she
came on the bed. Boughs heaped a foot thick with the blankets on top,
neatly stretched out, and the tarpaulin over all, made a couch as soft
as down and fragrant with the pure scent of evergreens.

Joan tried the surface with a foot that sank to her ankle, then with her
hands, and finally sat down to think. The first fear was almost gone;
she understood that Bart was keeping her here until Dan came home, and
fear does not go hand in hand with understanding. She only wondered,
now, at the reason that kept Daddy Dan living in this cave so far from
the warm comfort of the cabin, and so far away from her mother; but
thinking makes small heads drowsy, and in five minutes Joan lay with her
head pillowed on her arm, sound asleep.

When she awoke, the evening-gray of the cave had given place to utter
blackness, alarming and thick. Joan sat up with a start; she would have
cried out, bewildered, but now she heard a noise on the gravel, and
turned to see Daddy Dan entering the cave with Satan behind him, quite
distinctly outlined by the sunset outside. Black Bart walked first,
looking back over his shoulder as though he led the way.

It was