y shouted in the high and vaulted chambers their
voices were echoed thunderously in their ears. The flaming tapers were
reflected in places from many points of quartz, or mica. The floor of
the cavern was quite smooth, and rose only a little. In places the walls
were worn as smooth as glass. In some dim, past age the center of this
island must have been a great lake, and the water had found an outlet
through these passages.

At one point they found a little circular chamber at one side, in which
was a bed of pine branches. It really looked as though the place had
been used----and not so long before----as a camp. There were the ashes
of a fire on the floor.

"Here's where the pirate has been living," Dora declared to her sister.
"It would scare the girls into fits if we should tell them so."

"Hush!" said Dorothy. "Perhaps that man _is_ here somewhere," and she,
at least, was glad to hurry on, although Chet searched the chamber with
particular care.

"What do you expect to find here, old man?" asked Lance, laughing.

But his chum only shook his head and led the way toward the distant
outlet of the passage.

CHAPTER XIII

THE STRANGE MAN AGAIN

They came out of the cave into a hollow, grown to a wilderness of small
trees, yet carpeted between with a brilliant sod of short grass. On the
steep sides were larger trees; but evidently, at a time not then long
past, the cup of the hollow had been cleared. And at one side was the
ruin of a log hut.

"The man who lived alone at this end of the island, and climbed up and
down Boulder Head, used to occupy this hut," said Chet.

"But those logs were cut a hundred years ago!" cried Dora Lockwood. "See
how they have rotted at the ends."

"I guess that's so. Nobody knows who built the cabin."

"Indians!" cried Jess.

"Indians didn't built log houses. The first settlers did that. Indians
lived in wigwams," declared Laura.

"Some old hunter lived here, maybe, when the woods were full of bears
and wildcats," suggested her chum.

"What's that!" suddenly shrieked Bobby. "There's a wildcat, now!"

"Behave!" commanded Laura, shaking the smaller girl. "You can't scare us
that way."

"Nothing more ferocious inhabits these woods than a Teddy-bear," laughed
Jess Morse.

"Then it was a Teddy bear I saw in that tree," declared Bobby, pointing.
"And it was a live one."

The girls--some of them, at least--drew together. "What did you see,
Clara?" demanded Nellie Agne