The Mystery at Bob-White Cave (17 page)

What had seemed so easy in descent became a nightmare. Small ledges that had held her corrugated soles so easily on the way down escaped her feet as she sought anchorage. The trickle of water that had dripped over the brim as she started down became a cascade, dousing her carbide lamp as her feet slipped from any hold, and she swung free in the cold, inky darkness.

“Mart!” she called frantically.

If any answer came, it was drowned in the roar of the waterfall that threatened to drown her from above.

Prayerfully, Trixie held on. She managed to loop the spare rope about her right hand, and she held on with all her strength. Her body hung like a pendulum as she swung from side to side. Terrified, she reached for a foothold, gained it, then lost it to swing again under the choking rush of icy water.

Slowly, oh, so very slowly, it seemed she was being raised. Or did she only imagine it? Now cold water from below crept up her body as high as her waist.

Suddenly the upward pull stopped. Her arms holding the rope slackened.
I just
can’t
hold on any longer
, Trixie thought.
Oh
,
Moms! Daddy! Someone help me!

Lessons to Learn ● 16

THE NOISE around Trixie grew louder and louder. Water splashed from above, gurgled from below, menacing, nearing.
Voices... voices....
Mart shouted something. Honey screamed.
Voices... voices... the rope isn’t moving up.... Mart’s drowned.... Honey’s drowned.... This awful... awful water.

In her confusion, Trixie imagined she saw white shapes moving about her, clouds of white shapes, ghosts of people, ghosts of fish... ghosts... ghosts.

Doggedly she held on; in frenzied desperation, she reached for a toehold, anything to propel herself upward from the swirling water, which was now up to her armpits.

That ghostly light... voices nearer... then a vigorous sharp tug at the rope! The ghostly forms merged into a blur of head lamps. Strong arms reached for Trixie, pulled her over the edge of the sinkhole, and gathered her up.

With a great sigh, Trixie opened her eyes and looked into Jim’s anxious green eyes. Quietness came.
I’m safe,
she thought,
safe.

Water covered even the floor of the entrance room as Jim carried Trixie outside and placed her on a pallet Honey had made of their sweat shirts. Then they all waited, watching carefully while she rested.

The sun burst through the curtain of black clouds that had brought the cloudburst to swell the underground spring.

“That rain was a hazard nobody thought of,” Jim whispered.

“There we were, sheltered under the ledge, till Honey shouted for us,” Brian said in a low voice.

“In the minute it took me to get inside, she could have drowned,” Bill Hawkins said. “What a guardian I turned out to be!”

Honey said nothing but “Poor Trixie! Poor Trixie!” over and over again, till the refrain sparked Trixie’s sense of humor, and she sat up, laughing.

“You look like Chinese professional mourners,” she said. “I’m all right. I’m a little damp, but I’m all right!” She stretched her arms, pretending'to feel her muscles. “What happened?”

“What a girl!” Jim said. Then he told Trixie of the quick thunderstorm that had come up unexpectedly, just as it had the day after they arrived at the lodge. “It seemed as though the whole lake fell on us.”

“We never dreamed you’d be in danger in the cave,” Brian said. “In fact, we remarked that it was fortunate you were under cover.”

“We took cover under the ledge to wait out the storm,” Jim said. “Suddenly there was Honey, struggling through the downpour, calling for help.”

“We ran to help, and then everything happened at once,” Brian went on. “There was Mr. Hawkins, flat on his face, trying to bring you up. And there was Mart, practically purple, holding on to the rope, the water gushing in, the stream roaring, a waterfall as big as Niagara pouring over the edge of a big hole, and Honey screaming that Trixie was down there!”

“We don’t know what happened from then on,” Jim said. “We only know that we brought you up in time—thank God, in time!”

“Did you save my fish?” Trixie asked.

Her question, so anticlimactic, brought a burst of relieved laughter.

“The fish and other stuff are in the bucket,” Mart said, “and their delicious food in this other bucket.” He tipped the bait pail so Trixie could see the squirming worms.

“Oh, down at the bottom there are hundreds of ghost fish,” Trixie said. “Did I get
any
of them, Mart? I don’t seem to remember right now.”

“Two ghost fish, a salamander, two white crayfish, and a bunch of round ghost worms,” Mart recited.

“And a partridge in a pear tree!” Trixie mimicked. “But two fish are not enough. After that awful trip after them, we still don’t have specimens that’ll win the reward. Brian! Jim!” Trixie looked expectantly toward the cave. “I’ll bet that water’s gone down, now that the rain’s stopped.”

“Good grief, Trixie! Go down that hole again? Not for a million miserable ghost fish!” Mart threw his hands over his head and made a gesture of complete bewilderment.

“I didn’t mean go down right now,” Trixie said.

“Well, I mean
never
go down again, no matter what we’d find at the bottom. One experience like that will last me!” Mart was emphatic.

“I don’t even want to come over on this side of the lake again,” Honey said, her voice quivering.

Bill Hawkins, still dazed, just kept repeating, “It was all my fault—all my fault.”

“It wasn’t anyone’s fault except my very own,” Trixie said.

“Say what you want, I was responsible. If it had been one of my own children down there, I couldn’t feel worse. All I thought about was keeping a lookout for Slim. I even saw the clouds and knew it was going to rain. It never occurred to me there’d be any danger from rain
inside
the cave.”

“It’s all over now, and that’s all we need to care about,” Trixie said. “Except, gosh, I wish Uncle Andrew didn’t have to know I went down in that sinkhole like that.”

“Or that I let you go,” Mart said.

“And me,” Honey added.

“He’ll have a good right never to speak to me again,” Bill Hawkins said. “Let’s go over to the lodge now. Trixie needs dry clothes and something hot to drink. We might as well face Andy Belden now as later.”

“You’re all soaked through,” Mrs. Moore said as they trooped into the lodge. “I could see that downpour across the lake. It hardly rained here at all. My! You look almost drowned!”

Honey caught her breath at the word, but Trixie said quickly, “We did get pretty wet. I guess we’d better change our clothes.”

“I’ll make some hot chocolate,” Mrs. Moore said. “Bill, will you have some coffee, or are you in too much of a hurry to go on home?”

“I’m not going home till I get a chance to talk to Andy,” Hawkins said. “I’ll have a cup of coffee, please, then I’ll go out and work on the mule shed till he gets here.”

“Everybody acts so queer,” Mrs. Moore said to the Bob-Whites after they’d changed to dry clothes. “Bill hardly drank a spoonful of coffee. Did anything happen over there in the cave? Was that Slim up to more of his wickedness?”

“Jim, bring out the bait buckets, please, and show Mrs. Moore what we found today,” Trixie said as she sipped her hot chocolate. “We found fish and salamanders, and Mart has a queer bottle and a spider in his specimen jar. It was quite a day!”

“You can say that again!” Mart said solemnly.

Jim showed Mrs. Moore the fish, then he and the other boys took the buckets down to the cold cellar to the galvanized tank.

“You aren’t fooling me one bit, Trixie Belden,” Mrs. Moore said when they had gone. “I know something out of the way happened at the cave. Look at Honey’s face!”

“My face?” Honey asked. “What’s wrong with my face?”

“It has fright printed all over it,” Mrs. Moore said. “I don’t have a daughter your age without being able to read a girl’s face. Never mind; your uncle and Linnie just drove in the yard, and it won’t take him long to find out what’s wrong.”

It
didn’t
take Uncle Andrew long to find out, because Bill Hawkins told him as soon as he stepped from the wagon. The Bob-Whites saw him in earnest conversation with Uncle Andrew and ran out into the yard. Mrs. Moore followed.

Trixie put her arms around her uncle. He held her close to him and listened, white-faced, till Bill Hawkins finished his story.

“It wasn’t that way at all,” Trixie tried to explain. “It wasn’t Mr. Hawkins’s fault. It was every single bit mine, no matter what anyone says.”

Uncle Andrew’s arms tightened around Trixie. “My own brother’s child nearly drowned. Oh, I do thank God you’re safe. These children,” he said to Bill Hawkins, “are as dear to me as they could possibly be if they were my own. To think how near we came to losing this little girl! How could you, Bill?”

Mrs. Moore held her apron over her face and cried unrestrainedly.

“It
wasn't
Mr. Hawkins’s fault. I keep telling you that, Uncle Andrew. He didn’t know a thing about what was going on inside that cave. He was watching for Slim outside, just as you told him to. Tell him you don’t blame him, please. He feels so bad!”

“It’ll take me some time to do that, Trixie. I’m sorry, Bill, but that’s the way it has to be.”

“I don’t blame you a bit, Andy. It’ll be a longer time till I forgive myself. I’ve still got to tell Minnie about it, too.” He strode off up the trail that led to his house.

“I hate to see him so worried. He’s such a nice man, and, jeepers, Uncle Andrew, I’m all right. Don’t think I wasn’t scared, because I was, but, heavens, I don’t want everyone to get so worked up about it. The Bob-Whites rallied to help. They always do.
Nothing
can happen to one of us when the others are near...
nothing!”

“I wish I were as convinced of that as you are, Trixie. The Bob-Whites are a fine group of young people. No doubt about that. But remember this!” he shook his finger to emphasize his statement. “No more spelunking for any of you! I want to see you get on that train to Springfield in one piece. I don’t expect more than
one
miracle to happen in a few days’ time. I’ve been blessed with two. Trixie was saved from that wildcat, and now she’s been saved from drowning. I don’t intend to try the mercy of the Almighty too far.” Uncle Andrew’s voice shook with vehemence born of released tension.

Amazed and shocked at her uncle’s mandate, Trixie took some time to find her voice.

“You can’t possibly mean that! That cave is just full of ghost fish! We
have
to earn that reward. We
have
to have the five hundred dollars!”

“I’ll give you five hundred gladly,” Uncle Andrew said.

Trixie shook her head positively. “We can’t take it from you. We’ve never had one penny given to us for one of our projects. We’ve always
earned
the money. Oh, dear, I just
know
we can find all three specimens that man wants! Uncle Andrew,
please!”

“Not one step into any cave,” Uncle Andrew said, his face grim. “What a day!” He straightened and seemed to pull himself together with an effort. “Mrs. Moore, I think we’ll all feel better when we’ve had our dinner.”

Dinner didn’t help. No one could eat. No one could say a word. Once, in the living room after dinner, Jim tried to change Uncle Andrew’s mind. “We could take some solid beams and lay them across that hole. With a rope ladder fastened to them, it would be a breeze to go down in that well,” he began.

Uncle Andrew just held up his hand, and Jim was silenced. “We’ve had enough of that subject. Even though you haven’t asked me, I’ll tell you about my talk with Sam Owens today.”

“It went out of my mind completely,” Trixie said. “Did he question Slim?”

“He couldn’t find him. Somebody told Sam they thought they saw Slim getting into a boxcar as the morning freight pulled out of White Hole Springs.”

“Doesn’t that look as though he’s guilty?” Mart asked.

“It does. The men I saw in town were stirred up over the rumor that he set the fire. He may have been afraid of a necktie party.”

“Did Mr. Owens question the man in the ghost cabin?”

“He couldn’t find him, either. He disappeared into the woods. But I talked with Mr. Glendenning, the Englishman you Bob-Whites saved from the lake. He stayed for a while at the ghost cabin, you’ll recall.”

“What did he say?” Trixie asked eagerly.

“That the man he stayed with wouldn’t hurt a fly. He said he was sort of confused—maybe a little off in the head—but the kindest person he ever knew.”