it was the roommate of our friend
with the eyes."

"Have I been eating those things?" Desiree demanded.

Harry grinned.

"Yes, and that isn't all. You'll continue to eat 'em as long as I'm
the cook. Come on, Paul; it's a day's work."

We dragged the bodies down to the edge of the stream and tossed them
into the current, saving three or four for the replenishment of the
larder.

I then first tried my hand at the task of skinning and cleaning them,
and by the time I had finished was thoroughly disgusted with it and
myself. Harry had become hardened to it; he whistled over the job as
though he had been born in a butcher's shop.

"I'd rather go hungry," I declared, washing my hands and arms in the
cool water.

"Oh, sure," said Harry; "my efforts are never appreciated. I've fed
you up till you've finally graduated from the skeleton class, and you
immediately begin to criticize the table. I know now what it means to
run a boarding-house. Why don't you change your hotel?"

By the time we had finished we were pretty well tired out, but Harry
wouldn't hear of rest. I was eager myself for another look at the exit
of that stream. So, again taking up our spears, we set out across the
cavern, this time with Desiree between us. She swallowed Harry's
ridicule of her fear and refused to stay behind.

Again we stood at the point where the stream left the cavern through
the broad arch of a tunnel.

"There's a chance there," said Harry, turning to me. "It looks good."

"Yes, if we had a boat," I agreed. "But that's a ten-mile current, and
probably deep."

I waded out some twenty feet and was nearly swept beneath the surface
as the water circled about my shoulders.

"We couldn't follow that on our feet," I declared, returning to the
shore. "But it does look promising. At ten miles an hour we'd reach
the western slope in four hours. Four hours to sunshine--but it might
as well be four hundred. It's impossible."

We turned then and retraced our steps to our camp, if I may give it so
dignified a title. I hated to give up the idea of following the bed of
the stream, for it was certain that somewhere it found the surface of
the earth, and I revolved in my brain every conceivable means to do so.
The same thought was in Harry's mind, for he turned to me suddenly:

"If we only had something for stringers, I could make a raft that would
carry us to the Pacific and across it. The hide of that thing over
yonder w