“Now!” he gasped; and instantly the both of us were battling and struggling, he to hold me firm, and I to get way on and leverage. For a minute the issue was doubtful; the mound sunk and crumbled still lower; I clawed frantically with my toes, my legs going like a frog’s on a slippery basin. But at last I got hold, and a little ease to my lungs; and so, hauling on to the hands held out to me, and wriggling up foot by foot, was drawn into the opening, now much enlarged, and crawling through, rolled, tangled up with Harry, down a slope into darkness. CHAPTER IV. THE SECRET IN THE HILL. My first impression, as I sat up to gather my wits, was of awakening from a falling nightmare to the comfortable security of bed and early morning. The frantic fears engendered of that fathomless descent were all resolved in laughter. I giggled as I recalled them, shaking my dusty noddle to get the brains into place in it. Opposite me I could discern a shadowy figure, squatting in a like process of self-recovery. “Well, old chap,” I said; “here we are!” The sound of my voice, clanging in a vaulted space, gave me a start. “O!” I exclaimed; and the monosyllable rolled away into the darkness like a barrel. We scrambled up, while it was still echoing, and catching involuntarily at one another, looked fearfully about us. At a height of twelve feet or so behind us shone the opening through which we had entered. It made a great splotch of light, with a dim tail running fanlike from it down the slope by which we had fallen. The effect to us, standing possessed by gloom, was as of our being involved in the tail of a comet. So long as we looked that way, it dazzled and perplexed us. We turned our backs on it. Then, gradually, the obscure details of the place gathered coherence; and we saw that we were standing in a low vaulted chamber, giving at its further end upon a sewer-like mouth of blackness. “Dicky,” said Harry, in a rather tremulous whisper, “have you got the candles and lucifers all safe? This is p-p-prime, isn’t it?” “Yes,” I gulped, to either question. But I answered without heart, being sick to postpone the advance, by whatever means, for a little. “Don’t let me go, you old idiot!” I complained in a panic, as he made as if to step forward. “Supposing we lost one another. Ha-Harry, do you know what I saw under my arm as you p-pulled me up outside there?” “No. What?” “Rampick--the b-beast--scuttling for the Gap. He must have been watching us again, hidden below somewhere this time; and like enough now he’s making for the cliff overhead.” Harry began chuckling, but stopped in a fright to hear himself answered, as it were, by a patter of little laughing hiccoughs. “He won’t find much,” he whispered, “and we needn’t be afraid he’ll follow us down here. Light a candle, Dicky, for goodness’ sake. There seem to be all sorts of things creeping and rustling.”