IN THE OLD BEAR DEN
"Girls! Oh, girls!" shrieked Grace. "Walter is lost!"
She might have been foolish enough to try to draw in her pony; but
Rhoda, riding close beside her, snatched the reins out of Grace's
hand.
"More likely he thinks we are lost!" Rhoda exclaimed so that Grace,
at least, heard her. Then she shouted to the others: "This way!
This way!"
"Wha-at wa-ay?" demanded Bess Harley. "I--I'm going
every-which-way, right now!"
But, in a very few minutes, it appeared that this sudden tempest
was nothing to make fun over. The four girls, keeping close
together, entered suddenly a gulch, the side of which broke the
velocity of the wind. They stood there, the four ponies huddled
together, in a whirl of dust and flying debris.
"Shout for him!" commanded Rhoda. "Don't cry, Grace. Walter is
quite smart enough to look out for himself."
"Don't be a baby, dear," Nan said, leaning forward to pat Grace's
arm. "He will be all right. And so shall we."
"But not standing here!" exclaimed Rhoda, after they had almost
split their throats, as Bess declared, shrieking for the missing
boy. "We must go farther up the gulch. I know a place--"
"There goes my hat!" wailed Bess.
"You'll probably never see it again," said Rhoda. "Come on! Maybe
Walter will find us."
"But he doesn't know this country as you do, Rhoda," objected Nan.
"He'll know what to do just the same," Rhoda said practically.
"He will if he remembers what your father told us," said Bess.
"What's that?" demanded her chum.
"Mr. Ham-Hammond said to lie do-own and hang on to the
grass-roots," stammered the almost breathless Bess. "And I guess
we'd better do that, too."
"Come on. I'll get you out of the wind," said Rhoda, jerking her
horse's head around.
The other animals followed. Whether the three Eastern girls were
willing to be led away by Rhoda or not, their mounts would
instinctively keep together.
Around them the wind still shrieked, coming in gusts now and then
that utterly drowned the voices of the girls. Rhoda seemed to have
great confidence, but her friends felt that their situation was
quite desperate.
The deeper they went into the gulch, however, the more they became
sheltered from the wind. This was merely a slash in the hillside;
it was not a canyon. Rhoda told them there was no farther exit to
the place; it was merely a pocket in the hill.
"It has been used more than once as a corral for horses," she
explained. "But there's an old bears' den up here--"
"Oh, mercy!" screamed Grace. "A bear!"
"Hasn't been one seen about here since I was born," declared Rhoda
quickly. "But that old den is just the place for us."
Within ten minutes they reached a huge boulder that had broken away
from the west side of the gulch. Behind it was an opening among
other rocks. Indeed, this whole rift in the hillside was a mass of
broken rock. It was hard for the ponies to pick a path between the
stones. And it had grown very dark, too.
The other girls would never have dared venture into the dark pocket
behind that boulder had Rhoda not led them. She dismounted, and,
seizing her pony's bridle, started around the huge rock and into
the cavity.
"Must we take in the horses, too?" cried Bess. "I never!"
"I won't balk at a stable, if we can get out of this wind," Nan
declared. "Go ahead, Gracie, dear. Don't cry. Walter will be all
right."
"But do you think we shall be all right?" asked Bess of her chum,
when Grace had started in behind Rhoda.
"I guess we'll have to take Rhoda's word for it," admitted Nan.
"This is no place to stop and argue the question, my dear."
She made Bess go before, and she brought up the rear of the
procession. It was as dark as pitch in that cavern. The entrance
was just about wide enough for the horses to get through, and not
much higher than a stable door.
"Here we are!" shouted the Western girl, and by the echoing of her
voice Nan knew that Rhoda must be in a much larger cavern than this
passage.
The others pressed on. The ponies' hoofs rang upon solid rock. The
roaring of the tornado changed to a lower key as they went on. From
somewhere light enough entered for Nan to begin to distinguish
objects in the cave.
The horses stamped and whinnied to each other. Nan's pinto snuggled
his nose into her palm. The animal's satisfaction in having got
into this refuge encouraged the girl.
"Well, I guess we're all right in here," she said aloud. "The
ponies seem to like it."
"Cheerful Grigg!" scoffed Bess. "My! I never thought I'd live to
see the time that I should be glad to take refuge in a bears' den."
"O-o-oh, don't!" begged Grace.
"Don't be a goosie," said Bess. "The bear won't hear us. He must be
dead a long time now, if he hasn't been heard of since Rhoda was
born."
"Well, you know, bears hibernate," ventured Grace Mason. "They go
to sleep and don't wake up, sometimes, for ever and ever so long."
"Not for fifteen years," laughed Rhoda.
Just then, to their surprise, not to say their fright, there came
to their ears a most startling sound out of the darkness of the
cave!
It was a more uncanny noise than any of the young people had ever
in their lives heard before. Rising higher, and higher, shriller
and yet more shrill, the sound seemed to shudder through the cavern
as though caused by some supernatural source. There was nothing
human in a single note of it!
"Oh!" whispered the shaking Grace, "is that a bear?"
"Never in this world!" exclaimed Nan.
"I don't know what it is," asserted Bess. "But if it is a bear, or
not, I hope it doesn't do it again."
"Rhoda, what do you think?" demanded Nan, in an awed undertone.
"Hush!" returned the Western girl. "Listen."
"I don't want to listen--not to that thing," declared Bess, with
conviction. "It's worse than a banshee. Worse than the black ghost
at the Lakeview Hall boathouse."
Once more the noise reached them; and if at first it had startled
the four girls, it now did more. For the ponies whose bridles they
held, showed disturbance. Grace's mount lifted his head and
answered the strange cry with a whinny that startled the echoes of
the cavern like bats about their ears.
"Oh, don't, Do Fuss!" commanded Grace. "Don't be such a bad little
horse. You make it worse."
"He surely would not have neighed if that was a bear shouting at
us," declared Bess.
"Bear, nonsense!" scoffed Rhoda.
"Well, put a better name to it," challenged Bess.
For a third time the eerie cry rang out. The noise completely
silenced Rhoda for the moment. Nan said, with more apparent
confidence than she really felt:
"One thing, it doesn't seem to come nearer. But it gives me the
shakes."
"It can't be that terrible wind blowing into the cavern by some
hole, can it?" queried Bess.
"You are more inventive than practical, Bess," said her chum. "That
is not the wind, I guarantee."
"But what is it, then?"
"I wish I could tell you, girls. But I really cannot guess,"
admitted the girl of Rose Ranch, at last.
"You never heard it before?" queried Grace.
"I certainly never did!"
"Say! I ho-ope I'll never hear it again," declared Bess.
But her hope did not come true. Almost immediately the prolonged
subterranean murmur echoed and reechoed through the cavern, dying
away at last in a choking sound that frightened the quartette of
girls deplorably.
Grace began to sob. Nan and Bess were really frightened dumb for
the time. Rhoda Hammond felt that she should keep up their courage.
"Don't, Gracie. Don't get all worked up. There must be some
sensible explanation of the sound. It is nothing that is going to
hurt us--"
"How do you know?" demanded Grace.
"Because, if it was any animal that might attack us, it surely
would have come nearer. And it hasn't. Besides, if it were a
dangerous beast, the ponies would have shown signs of uneasiness
long since."
In fact, this was a very sensible statement, and Nan Sherwood, for
one, quite appreciated the fact.
"Of course you are right, Rhoda. We are in no danger."
"You don't know that," grumbled Bess.
"Yes, I do. Unless the sound is made by some human being. And that
seems impossible. There is no wild man about, of course, Rhoda?"
"Not that I ever heard of," said the girl of Rose Ranch. "Nobody
wilder than our cowboys," and she tried to laugh.
"Well, then, we must not pay any attention to the noise," said Nan,
the practical.
"Come on, now," said Rhoda, starting to one side with the pony she
led. "Bring them all over here and I will hobble them. Then we can
find some place to sit down and wait for the storm to pass. It will
rain terribly after the wind. It always does."
"That is all right, Rhoda. I had forgotten about the tornado," said
Bess. "What I want to know is: Have you got your rifle safe?"
"Of course. And it is loaded."
"Then I feel better," Bess declared. "For if that dreadful
thing--whatever it is--comes near us, you can shoot it."
"I can see plainly," laughed Nan, "that you do not believe the
noise is supernatural, Bess."
"Humph! maybe you could shoot a ghost. Who knows?"