Dick pressed closer to me, and I could feel him drinking in deep drafts of the grateful outer air. "What new wonder is this?" he would ask, with something akin to awe in his voice; but we must needs grope this way and that to feel out the answer with our finger-tips. When the answer was found, the mystery of the lost trail was solved most simply. As we made out, we were in a deep crevice cut crosswise by the stream which, issuing from a yawning cavern in the farther wall, was quickly engulfed again by that lower archway we had just traversed. In some upheaval of the earthquake age a huge slice of the mountain's face had split off and settled away from the parent cliff to leave a deep cleft open to the sky. One end of this crevice chasm--that toward the upland valley--was choked and filled by the debris of later landslides; but the lower end was open. Through this lower end, as we made no doubt, the powder train had come, turning from the Indian path in the gorge up the bed of the barrier stream, turning again at the outer cavern mouth to squeeze in single file between the thickly matted undergrowth and the cliff's face, and so to pass around the split-off mass and come into the crevice rift. How the sharp eyes of the old hunter, and those of the Catawba as well, had missed the finding of this squeezing place where the cavalcade had left the stream-bed, we could never guess; but on the chance that we might yet need to know all the crooks and turnings of this outlet, we felt our way quite around the masking cliff and down to the stream's edge in the gorge. That done we were ready for a farther advance, and clambering back into the crevice we once more took the stream for our guide and were presently deep in the natural tunnel piercing the mountain proper. This extension of the subterranean waterway proved to be a noble cavern, wide and high enough to pass a loaded wain, as we determined by tossing pebbles against the arching roof. None the less, 'twas full of crooks and windings; and in the sharpest elbow of them all, where we were like to lose our way by blundering into one of the many branching side passages, Richard stopped me with a hand thrust back. "Softly!" he cautioned; "here are their vedettes!" Just beyond the crooking elbow the dull red glow from a tiny fire gone to coals showed us two Indian sentries set to keep the pass. Dick drew his claymore, but he was chilling again and the hand that grasped the great blade was shaking as with a palsy. Yet he would mutter, as the teeth-chattering suffered him: "What say you, Jack? Shall we rush them? There's naught else for it." And then, with a gritting oath: "Oh, damn this cursed chilling!"