them
chokingly. There was no time to be lost.

Never for an instant dreaming that Pedro understood, they gave him the
torches he was to bear, and started into the depths of the cavern. And
the boy? Too frightened at first to have spoken had he tried to, he had
the wit to see that protest would be useless. They were three to one,
armed, and desperate, and they counted him a likely witness to their
incendiarism.

Besides, now that the wind had changed, he could not have gone ten paces
without having been blinded by the smoke till he could not see where he
was heading. This side of the canyon was going to go like tinder, too.
Besides,--this came later,--how could he allow the fire bugs to get away?
His job was to keep tabs on them, and that he would now have an
exceptional opportunity to do, he cheered himself.

At first the flare of the torches revealed merely the cavern of onyx
stalactites he had seen the night before. This formation wound in a
narrowing labyrinth until they made a sharp turn to the left. Presently
they came to a pit of inky water, around which they had to skirt on a
sloping shelf. The burros could not make it and they left them there.
Either, Pedro argued, they meant to return that way or else they had
other supplies awaiting them. But now they could no longer smell the
smoke. From somewhere came pure air, damp and refreshingly chilly. The
sounds of the outer world were cut off completely. On and on they
wandered as in a dream. Pedro began surreptitiously pinching himself to
make sure he was not having some weird nightmare.

They came to a grotto that might have been brown marble, whose curious
carvings he had no time to study. From this they had to crawl on hands
and knees through an opening into another twisting passageway, floored
with muddy water and barely high enough for them to stand erect. Their
voices echoed and reechoed. Then came arches of stalactites almost
meeting the stalagmites beneath them, through which they edged their way
as through a frozen forest.

This opened into a vast cavern hung as with icicles of alabaster, which
their torch light warmed to onyx.

"If these fellows weren't so free with their knives," Pedro told himself,
"it would be an adventure worth having. But they certainly have too much
dynamite in their dispositions to suit me,"--for the Mexicans were now
quarreling among themselves. The boy and the old man were for turning
back before they lost themselves,--for a