Then for the first time
he studied closely the grey, still face of the youth he had slain.
The skull was crushed. There was frozen blood down the back of the
head and neck--He started up in sudden consternation. There would
be blood-stains where the body had lain so long,--tell-tale,
convicting stains! He must be swift with the work in hand. Those
stains must be wiped out before the break of day.
Lowering himself into the opening, he began digging at one end with
his hands, scooping back quantities of wet leaves. There was snow
down there in the pit,--a foot or more of it. After a few minutes
of vigorous clawing, a hole in the side of the fissure was revealed,--an
aperture large enough for a man to crawl into. He knew where it
led to: down into Quill's cave twenty feet below.
Some one,--perhaps an Indian long before the time of Quill, or it
may have been Quill himself,--had chiselled hand and toe niches in
the sides of this well and had used the strange shaft as means of
getting into and out of the cave. Windom's father had closed this
shaft when David was a small boy, after the venturesome youngster
had gone down into the cave and, unable to climb out again, had
been the cause of an all-day search by his distracted parent and
every neighbour for miles around. The elder Windom had blocked the
bottom of the hole with a huge boulder, shorn from the side of the
cave by some remote wrench of nature.
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