When nothing but silence answered her, she leaned out on the limb and tossed her hat into the mouth of the cave. After it she threw some big pieces of bark, making them land well inside with no little noise. As there was still no sound she waited no longer. The branch out upon which she edged her slow way was both sturdy in itself and made doubly safe by the fact that it lay across the ledge, reaching with its tips to the rock wall at the side of the natural door. In a moment she had scrambled across, had leaped to her feet and was peering into the vast, shadowy interior. There are few of us for whom a cave does not have a rare attraction, an appeal little short of fascinating, that has in it something of romance perhaps, certainly something of mystery and a dim, vague stirring of primitive and vital feelings, a shadowy harking back to the early life history of mankind. To Wanda Leland, in so many essentials a child of the wild, such a cavern as this was a bit of wonderland. Her swift running, pioneer blood tingled; her heart gladdened with a glow of discovery and exploration. Perhaps cave men had dwelt here, secure and watchful, in the forgotten ages; the idea thrilled. Certainly no man of her own time or her father's knew of the place: that thought made the spot her own, and intensified her eager delight in finding it. It had, to her sensitive, imaginative nature, an aura that she felt had clung to it always. It was a bit of the wild, the retreat of the wild things, sternly expressive of a savage grandeur. Her sensations a strange composite of many dim, intangible, inexpressible emotions, Wanda tiptoed to the opening, paused listening, took two or three quick steps and was inside the cave. For a moment she fully expected to see the sight she dreaded, a pair of gleaming points of light blazing at her menacingly. And for a little she saw nothing but shadowy, unreal shapes. Her heart leaped wildly as the startling fancy came to her that these were the phantoms of the long dead time when men had lived here, ghosts of the older race.