“W-wedged!... Wedged!”

Now–now it was another word which jabbered faintly in the dark fissure’s mouth! A girl caught it–or thought she did.

“Wedged!” she echoed wildly. “Caught! Oh, maybe–maybe–there’s nothing in there but Ruddy himself!”

“Maybe–so!” Stud panted heavily while, across an inner, gaping hollow, the next words took a giant stride to his lips: “Anyhow–I’m going up!”

“Oh–Studley!” But beyond this one faint cry, Jessie, stanch little partner,–the girl behind the lines,–said no more to hinder him now, as she watched the scout detach his little lamp from his hatbrim and hook it on to his khaki breast.

With it glowing there, a headlight for his gallant heart, Stud set himself to climb. Standing upon the shoulders of two brother scouts, in his belt a club snatched from one of them, he reached the lowest point of the tapering fissure.

“Ha! There he goes, in spite of his teeth,” tremored a younger boy.

“His teeth aren’t chattering!” Pem’s eyes–lightning-blue–hurled back the charge.

The denial rang in Stud’s ears as he thrust his head into the black opening, entering, amidships, as the former muddle-headed explorer had done.

“That girl’s a trump–the girl with eyes the color of the little ‘heal-all’, that blue flower we pick up here in May! A trump! But so’s little Jess, too!”

Thus did Stoutheart, a knight of to-day, pay tribute to the world he left behind him, when he felt in his exploring knees, now creeping along the bottom of the Tinker’s Pot, that there was a chance of his leaving it behind forever.“I don’t see what else he could have done,” said Tanpa, the Guardian, her fingers hysterically interlocking. “Somebody had to go up; and he’s the oldest boy–a Patrol Leader. But, oh! I wish my husband were here. Run and meet him, a couple of you!” She glanced appealingly at the scouts. “Oh! do–and hurry him back–back from the spring.”

Meanwhile Stud had forgotten even his backers in the feminine hearts below and was banking all on just one trusty ally–the headlight on his breast.

“Without the light, the little safety lamp, I couldn’t do-o it,” he told himself. “Gee! but it is as black in here as Erebus, a Tinker’s Pot, indeed–the blindest passage–blindest bargain–I ever struck! So–so sharp underneath, too!”

Yes, difficulty masked was in the “bargain”, yet he crept on over tapering ridges of rock that now and again buckled like teeth. But he knew by the parched sound of his own voice, as he shouted a question, that his courage might have ended in smoke, there and then, if it weren’t for the little lamp at his breast.

So rosily it burned now, in here, that its feeding oil seemed the red blood of his heart!

“Anyhow–anyhow, with it, I’ll be able to see which way the cat jumps!”

Here, Stoutheart more tightly gripped the club; the last words might prove more than mere figure of speech.

From ahead came strange, gurgling, choking sounds, rising from somewhere–growing weaker.

“Where–where are you, Ruddy? Answer! R-rap–rap out something, if you can!” he adjured.

And it was–truly–a rapping reply that reached him; a queer, hollow knocking at the door of some throat that semed shutting.

“My word! What on earth ... what in thunder’s got him?” Stud felt his own breath blow hot and cold together, but–this crucial moment it came back to him–the eyes of a girl out there had driven it home, with blue lightnings, that he did not have to defy his teeth.

“Humph! I’m no quitter,” he told the piloting breast-ray, blazing its ruby trail ahead. “Well-ll! for the love of Mike! Well! what do you know about that?... What have we h-here?”

In answer to his gasping snort, as he gaped and gasped there in the darkness, the little safety lamp told him what it made of it–of the staggering sight–it made a pair of big feet in rough cowhide boots tightly wedged by the ankles in a buckling switch of rock where two sharp, narrow ridges that formed the bottom of the Tinker’s Pot dovetailed into each other,–after the manner of rails at a switch.

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!

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.

“Well! I should say! He was hanging between hawk and buzzard–if ever a fellow was,” happened to be Stud’s moved comment as, clinging to that lowered rope, he was hoisted, too, through that covert opening, the loyal little lamp upon his breast paling now into a penny candle held towards the sun.

But the rescuer’s halo did not pale.

It burnished the picnic luncheon which followed, encircling, rainbow-like, little Jessie who basked in it more than did the rebellious hero, pelted with wild flowers by the girls–as symbolic of other bouquets.

“Oh! let up–let up–will you? Those big fellows will take me for the ‘goat’–somebody’s ‘goat’!” protested Stud helplessly, striving to direct attention from himself by training it upon a straggling group of distant youths, really too far off to take stock of what was going on among the merry picnic party.But Pemrose was taking stock of them. Her widening eyes, her reddening cheeks, the little piqued shiver that electrified her chin, told that one figure–one figure–called for recognition; called for it, indeed, so loudly that it couldn’t be denied him.

Every member of that group–a canoeing party, a wading party, it was, just landed from the near-by river, the blue Housatonic–was a blaze of color.

But the sturdiest among them was simply barbaric. The warm sunlight of May dripped golden from his nickum shoulders, bronzed to the hue of a statue, bathed his bare knees and feet, his khaki shorts, the flame of an apricot jersey, the black and yellow cap,–the sheaf of mayflowers within his arm.

“Oh! how boys–big boys–do revel in color. A girl–any girl I ever knew–is demure in her taste beside them,” murmured the Camp Fire Guardian, with amused, motherly tolerance.“Pshaw! I think it’s hor-rid. So flashy!” snapped Pemrose; Jack at a Pinch had made gorgeous his incivility and was parading it before her eyes.

“Oh, boy! Look at that middle fellow. He’d have a grosbeak ‘skun a mile’!” gasped Stud, following the direction of her glance, with a virtuous consciousness of his own cave-soiled khaki, moderately lit by merit badge and service stripe.

“‘Grosbeak!’ Oh, but I love grosbeaks! And all that color–why! it paints the landscape,” came flutteringly from Aponi, the White Birch Butterfly, least Priscilla-like in her tastes of the Group, when she was not in Camp Fire green, or soft-toned ceremonial dress.

“Maybe ’twill paint the blues in old Tory Cave, if we run across them there,” put in Tomoke, maiden of the flambeau and the fire-talk. “They certainly are a perfect ‘scream’, those big boys,” her eyes merrily following that clamor of color now wending back towards the canoes.“Humph! they’d have to ‘go some’ to leaven the blues of Tory Cave,” remarked the Scoutmaster, laughingly addressing himself to a roll. “The biggest bonfire on earth wouldn’t half dry the cave-tears there.”

“Yes, that’s the den of the Doleful Dumps–their diggings!” laughed a younger scout, flourishing aloft a mess-mug, the gray of his rolling eyes. “Bats–bats as big as saucers–no, soup-plates! And, far in–far in–the sound of running water, like a weak wind!”

“Running water! Invisible running water! A–weak–wind! Oh-h! do let us hurry and go on there. We have to cross the river; haven’t we?” The gurgle of that cloistered brooklet was already in Pem’s heart as her dilating gaze spanned the Housatonic, broad and open, “warbling” amid its soft meadow slopes, as she had looked upon it from the Devil’s Chair. “But, goody! I hope we won’t run across him there–Jack at a Pinch! Flaunting round like a grosbeak!” She bit the thought into an olive. “Stud’s no grumpy riddle–if he is a Stoutheart, like the other!”