Ruddy, the slipslop explorer, had gone in heels over head, so to speak. He was hanging by the heels now. Nothing visible of him but those pinioned feet! "_Hea-vens!_ he did strike a blind bargain. S-such a snag! The passage ends here. A drop! A--blank--fall of rock! Gee-ee!" Dank--dank as cave-tears now was the moisture upon Stud's forehead. For the first time his teeth almost chattered. What would he see when he held the lamp over the edge of the Tinker's Pot into the horror of that empty space beyond where the passage broadened into blankness and the rock shelved sharply down? A dead boy? Or one so far gone from hanging that he could not be rescued? At the first sight of those wedged feet he had felt inclined to laugh. Now he was laughing at the wrong side of his mouth, as he peeped over the brink. "Oh-h! the rock _isn't_ perpendicular; it slants down, though, pretty sharply--down into an inner cave--by gracious! And Ruddy, the way he's hanging his nose, is within an inch or two o' the floor of that other cave!... And, yet, he's helpless! Helpless as if he had a halter round his neck! Oh-h! if some of the other fellows were here." But Stud did not seem to be quite alone; he was one and a half; for the hearts of two girls were pendent from _his_ neck; outside he knew they were backing him,--praying for him. Also, that frenzied gurgle from the victim's throat, his choking cry as the light struck him, the squirming body and up-rolling eyes told the boy scout that he was just in time; although the foam was pink upon Ruddy's lips and his congested head was a fire-ball, indeed,--that brash head with all his chances in it. "Ha! "No Loyal Scout gives place to doubt, But action quick he shows!" The song, his own, the original march-song of his troop, sang itself through Stud's brain, seethed in the low whistle upon his lips, as, guided by his ruby breast-eye, he slid down into that strange and secret dungeon in which the black passage ended and, thrusting his sturdy shoulders under the pendent body of the victim whose convulsed hands clutched vainly at the bare slab, raised it so that the choking boy could breathe freely again--and in due time shake off the dizziness of his awful plight, hung up by the heels by the rock itself. But not until the Scoutmaster came to his patrol leader's assistance could those pinioned feet be really freed and their owner brought to daylight again, not by a return via the fissure route, but hoisted in a rope-noose, as Pem had been from the Devil's Chair, through a grass-covered opening discoverable in the roof of that inner cave. "Goodness! after all, he wasn't so much more foolish--headstrong--than I was. But Una! Una! If you ever-r tell them!" Thus did the maiden of the chowchow name spill her spice into her friend's ear,--burning spice, for, privately, she was shocked at seeing her own folly, parodied, vulgarized, as it were.