With great caution the lad wormed his way through the brush, leaving Jumbo to guard the canoes. He had formed a daring determination to examine the rock and see if it was not possible in some miraculous way to move it. But an examination confirmed his worst fears.
The great stone was as immovable as if it had formed a part of the living rock. Tubby actually gave a groan of despair.
"There"s not a thing we can do," he moaned disconsolately. A sudden footfall above him made him dive into the brush. He flattened out, immovable, in a flash. The next instant Hunt strode into the glade, followed by his son. They also examined the stone.
"If they won"t come to our terms," said Hunt, as they turned away again, "we can immure them in a living tomb."
Tubby Hopkins, lying as quiet as a rabbit in his place of concealment, could not but feel the bitter truth the words held.
"Those fellows are a long time getting that water, and I"m as dry as a jar of salt," said Merritt, as they munched on their provisions.
"I guess we"re all pretty thirsty," said the major. "Perhaps you"d better go and hurry them up, my boy."
Merritt sprinted off on this errand. He had almost reached the ravine and was about to step on the narrow bridge across it when there was a sudden crashing jar that shook the earth.
Though, of course, he did not know it, the noise was occasioned by the falling rock dislodged by Hunt and his followers.
"Wonder what that was?" thought the boy, little guessing the real cause.
"If we were in the west I should think it was an earthquake. But I never heard of any in the Adirondacks."
Before long he gained a point in the pa.s.sage where he knew he should have seen a disc of daylight ahead of him. Puzzled by its absence, the boy pushed on. Every minute he expected to see the light, but the darkness continued to prevail. Sorely perplexed, he took a few steps more, when he was abruptly confronted by a ma.s.s of solid rock. The pa.s.sage appeared to have terminated.
It was several moments before the meaning of this conveyed itself to the boy"s mind. When he mastered the situation it was with a sense of shock that for an instant almost deprived him of his senses.
Recovering his wits he lost no time in communicating his alarming intelligence. Incidentally, the cause of the noise he had heard was abundantly explained.
It required but a brief examination by the major, to make known the full extent of their calamity.
"We are walled in," he said hoa.r.s.ely.
"Is there no hope of escape?" gasped the professor. The boys were too much overcome to speak.
The major shook his head. Unconsciously he repeated Tubby"s words.
"Help, if it is to come, must come from the outside," he said.
His words rang hollowly in the musty, subterranean pa.s.sage.
CHAPTER XXIV.
TWO COLUMNS OF SMOKE.
Through the deep woods a boyish figure was creeping. It was Hiram, footsore, sick and despondent. It was the second day since he had left the scene of the Boy Scouts" misfortune. Behind him lay the lake. And that was about all he knew definitely of his situation.
For the last hour of his slow progress over the cruelly rough ground, the lad"s heart had almost failed him. But he had kept pluckily on. At last, though, he was compelled, from sheer exhaustion, to sink down under a big hickory tree. He was lost, hopelessly lost in the midst of the Adirondack wilds.
Few men or boys who have ever been in a similar fix will not realize the extreme danger of Hiram"s position. There are still vast tracks in these mountains untrodden, except, perchance, at long intervals, by the foot of man. The predicament of one who misses his way in their lonely stretches is serious indeed. Hiram was a nervous, sensitive boy, moreover, and, as the dark shadows of late afternoon began to steal through the woods, he felt a sense of keen fear, and alarm. He even thought he could make out the forms of savage beasts prowling about him.
At last the boy determined, by a brave effort, to make the best of it. He ate a meal of bread and salt meat from his haversack and washed it down with water from his canteen. Then he set himself to thinking about a way out of his position.
But as is often the case with those hopelessly lost in the wilderness, his brain refused to work coherently. A sort of panic had clutched him.
To his excited, overwrought imagination it appeared that it was his fate, his destiny to die alone in these great, silent woods, stretching, for all he knew, to infinity on every side of him.
"I must brace up and do something," thought Hiram desperately; "maybe I haven"t wandered as far as I think. Perhaps a signal fire might be seen by somebody. I"ll try it, anyhow."
The thought of doing something cheered him mightily. The task of gathering wood and bark to make his fire also helped to keep his mind off his predicament.
The young Scout built his fire on the summit of the highest bit of ground he could find. It was a bare hillock, rocky and bleak, rising amid the trees.
The fire Hiram constructed was, properly speaking, composed of two piles of sticks and dry leaves and bark. Close at hand he piled a big armful of extra fuel to keep it going. For he had determined to watch by the fires all night, if necessary. It was, he felt, his last hope.
The fires arranged to his satisfaction, the boy set a match to each pile in turn. From the midst of the forest two columns of smoke ascended. The afternoon was still. Not a breath of wind ruffled a leaf. In the calm air the columns of smoke shot up straight. Hiram piled green leaves on his blazing heaps and the smoke grew thicker.
The message the two smoke columns spelled out, in Scout talk, was this:
"I am lost, help!"
Hiram knew if there were any Scouts within seeing distance of the two smoke columns, that he would be saved. If not--but he did not dare to dwell on that thought.
The late afternoon deepened into twilight, and still Hiram sat on, feeding his fires, although the flames of hope in his heart had died out into gray ashes of despair. As the darkness thickened and a gloom spread through the woods, his fears and nervousness increased. It is one thing to have a companion in the woods and the surety of a camp fire and comfort at night, and quite another pair of shoes to be lost in the impenetrable forest. Anybody who has experienced the dilemma can appreciate something of poor Hiram"s state of mind.
It grew almost dark. The two fires glowed in the twilight like two red eyes.
All at once Hiram almost uttered a shout of alarm. Then he grew still, his heart beating till it shook his frame. Somewhere, close to him, a twig had cracked. He was certain, too, that he had seen a dark form dodge behind a tree.
"Who"s there," he cried shrilly.
As if in reply, from behind the surrounding trees, a dozen dark forms suddenly emerged and started toward him. Half beside himself with alarm, Hiram, his mind full of visions of moonshiners, Indians and desperadoes, leaped to his feet and started to run for his life.
But he had not gone a dozen steps before he stumbled and fell. As he did so his head struck a rock and the blow stunned him.
The men who had emerged with such suddenness from behind the trees hastened up.
"We needn"t have feared a trap," said one; "it was a genuine Scout signal. I"m glad my boys taught them to me or we might have been too late to save this boy."
The speaker was the same man who had recognized Rob Blake, and whose two sons were members of the Curlew Patrol. He picked Hiram up.
"Lost and half scared to death," he said tenderly; "and just to think that we crept up on him like a bunch of prowling Indians."
"Well, we"ve got to look out for traps, you know," put in the leader, the gray-moustached man; "those two smoke columns that you knew the meaning of might have been a trick to decoy us. I"m glad we approached stealthily, but I"m sorry we scared this poor kid so badly."
"Oh, he"ll be all right directly," was the easy reply. "Sam, you and Jim get a kettle boiling and make coffee. We"ll camp here to-night," said Rob"s friend.