"Humph! We can't head him off, Jess." Her brother disclaimed responsibility with a shrug--while the little lamp winked sarcastically from his hatbrim--but in the heedful tone of the boy who had been trained to feel--as Toandoah did with his little petticoated pal--that Life was a game in which two could hunt together, even upon the trail of a Thunder Bird, and make good headway. "We can't turn him back!" Stud shrugged his khaki shoulders. "But he'll strike a blind bargain in there. Ha! There goes another 'niggling' match!" A frippery flame, indeed, its reflection flickered a moment, a gold tooth in the fissure's grinning mouth--darkness followed! Two or three of the boy scouts--those who did not, like Stud, show incredulity, sarcasm gleaming, hawk-eyed, from a ruby lamp hooked to a hatband, and from a level eye beneath it--held their breath, dazzled; for the moment beaten at their own brave game of exploring. So did the girl who had been piqued and dared into sitting in the Devil's Chair--with a sheer abyss beneath her! Again did her wide-open, staring eyes, under their black lashes, sport a Blue Peter, the flag of adventure. "Oh! he's plucky, anyhow. I wonder what he'll find in there?" her palms were laid together upon a spicy filling of excitement. "He really is daring--awfully daring, you know!" "Ha! Courage cobweb-weed!" muttered Stud laconically. "Well--well, he'll have tears in his eyes before I go after him!" And--with that--there was the rasp of a third "niggling" match, faintly-heard, far in, a momentary reflection, a tiny glance-coal, in the fissure's leering mouth! And--and, following that, a shriek! A shriek, headlong, sinking and pitching--dying like a falling star, as if some clutch were stifling it. "Hea-vens!" The girls, blanching, shrank against the opposite cave-wall, which shuddered behind them. A bat, flying low, a winged Fear, brushed Tanpa's cheek, as she stood, transfixed,--and her cry was almost as hysterical as theirs. In the blackness of that Tinker's Pot behind the looming fissure, were there other things--other things besides a boy, a broken braggart of a boy? Was Death in the pot with him? Had he sipped of its mystery--only to perish? Death--it seemed a raving possibility--in the shape of some wild animal, perhaps--a live, a clutching claw! Tales were always current among the mountains, trappers' tales--and most of them airy "traveler's yarns", too--of strange tracks seen in lonely spots, of lynx and bobcat; and even of the young and roving panther. To be sure, a three-cornered tunnel, the second floor back of a lofty cave, would be the last place to look for such an ambush, unless there was some fly-trap opening to it from above. But there might be! Boys and girls, both, their blood flamed upon the fear, then froze--until the silence, the bat-churned cave silence, was hung with icicles above them.