Page:The Whisper on the Stair by Lyon Mearson (1924).djvu/302

 she experienced all the old time confidence. They kept on their way, up around the sides of the hill, until it seemed as though it would not be possible to go further—as though they had covered every possible part of the hill.

“Here we are,” called Jessica from around the bend in the road.

They hurried around to where she was standing. It was steep on the side of the hill, almost at the summit. On one side rose the wall of soil and vegetation. In front was a plateau of perhaps twenty feet. Over the edge of the plateau there was a sheer drop of a hundred and fifty feet to the rocks below, broken by an occasional tree that jutted out from the side of the rocky slope.

“Where is it?” asked Val. They clustered around her.

“There,” she pointed to a mass of shrubbery at the side of the road that looked no different from the shrubbery all along the way. “You could never find it, not in a million years,” she said.

Stepping to it, she forced the shrubbery aside, disclosing a hole that was perhaps two feet high, stopped up by a large bowlder. “You’ll have to move the rock away.”

It was true. So cleverly had Nature concealed the place that one might have camped outside of the cave for weeks and never noticed it; it was a fitting hiding place—one could never in a lifetime come upon it by accident. And having come upon it, it would never occur to one that any other human had ever been there before. Old Peter Pomeroy had chosen wisely—that could be seen at a glance.