uickly.

Parker shook his head. "Not to speak of." He drew a long breath. "Well,
we've found the mine," he went on in a voice which failed to be quite
as matter of fact as he evidently tried to make it.

In an instant he was surrounded by the excited boys and fairly bombarded
with questions: "Did you fall down the hole?" "What's it like down
there?" "How did you get out?"

Court laughed a little shakily and sat down suddenly on a rock. "Give me
a chance, can't you?" he begged. "I've only got one tongue, even though
I can make that go pretty fast."

"Cut it out and quit worrying him, fellows," ordered Ranny. "Take your
time, Court, and start at the beginning. How did you get down the hole?"

"Cinchiest thing you know!" grinned Parker. "I just stepped on the cover
and went through. You see, when I went into that crack the hole didn't
show at all; there were a lot of branches and stuff over it. One minute
I was on solid ground, and the next I was flying through space."

"Gee!" exclaimed Sanson. "How deep was it?"

"Seemed about a mile; but I guess it wasn't more than twenty feet.
Luckily there was a lot of leaves and stuff at the bottom, so I landed
pretty soft. But when I tried to climb back I found it was too slippery.
Then I lost my voice yelling, but nobody came, so I started to look
around a bit. It's just one long tunnel, running both ways and braced
up by rotten old timbers and things. I had my flash-light in my pocket,
so I wasn't afraid of being lost. I took the right-hand turn and--I
say, fellows, there's a bear down there!"

"A bear?" chorused the astonished audience as one boy.

[Illustration: In an instant he was surrounded by excited boys]

"Well, it might be a wildcat or something like that. I only saw its
eyes, but I tell you they held me up, all right. About three hundred
feet from where I fell in there was another kind of a shaft thing, only
not so big, sort of off to one side. It wasn't very deep, either, for
when I looked down I saw those two big yellow eyes that didn't seem more
than eight or ten feet down. Gee whiz! I was scared. I must have got
turned around, too; because, when I came to, I found I was legging it
away from the big hole instead of back toward it."

He paused and drew a long breath; his fascinated hearers sighed in
sympathy. "Did you go back then?" one of them asked eagerly.

"I was thinking about it," resumed Court, "when my thumb slipped off
the flash-key, and ahead of m