m Ace's shoulders, the rim of the well was too slippery
with mud for him to gain a hand-hold.

The bats, blind from their lightless lives, bumped against them and added
the final touch of weirdness by their gnome-like faces.

With the uncanny feeling that they ought to whisper, the shaking boys
started to explore the cavern, which they found led off in three
directions. It must be on the same level they had left when they said
good-by to Radcliffe, but in their panic they were completely turned
around, and they had not explored for ten minutes before they were so
confused that they could not even have found their way back to the cavern
of the pool.

Now Ted had been lost before. He knew the panic feeling, the sudden sense
of utter and helpless isolation, the absurd fearfulness, almost the
temporary insanity of it. His scalp prickled,--as did Ace's,--and for a
little while his wits seemed befogged. Then he remembered that bed-rock
advice Long Lester had once given him. When you don't know which way to
go, sit down and don't move one step for half an hour. And try to think
out the way you got there, or some plan of campaign for finding yourself
again.

Ted had once been lost in the chaparral,--a thorny tangle of low growths
that reached higher than his head. When he first discovered he was off
the trail, he wandered about as in a mystic maze, till a shred of his own
gingham shirt, (caught on a stub of manzanita), told him he had circled.

He had had to spend the night there, but in the end he had stumbled upon
the trail again, not ten feet from where he lost it.

As Long Lester afterwards pointed out, had he but blazed his trail from
the very first step, he could at least have back-tracked. Or better, if
he had with his jack-knife made a blaze sufficiently high on some stunted
tree to have seen it and come back to it, he might have circled, and in
ever widening circles would surely, in time, have found the trail.

Or, again, he might have--had he known--at least hacked a straight course
by the stars, (always provided that he knew in which direction lay the
way out).

"Ace," he managed to steady his voice when they had been seated on a dry
ledge for some little time, "your knowledge of cave formations might help
us to find the way out of here. Gee! If this was only in the woods, or
even on some mountain side above the clouds! But it's up to you now."

"Well," Ace began, "the map of the typical cave, say like Mammo