“Look out!” shrieked Betty, stopping so suddenly that Libbie and Louise fell against her.  “Look!  I almost ran right into it!”

She pointed ahead to where the ground fell away abruptly.  A great chasm, like an angry scar, was cut through the earth, and on the side opposite to the girls a steep hill came down in an uncompromising slant.

“What a dandy hill for coasting!” ejaculated Bobby.  “Let’s come up here this winter.  We can steer away from this hole.”

“That’s no hole,” said Norma Guerin, in an odd voice.  “That’s Indian Chasm.  And it’s miles long.”

Betty stared at her.  She had thought Indian Chasm many miles away.

“I didn’t realize we had walked so far,” said Norma, apparently reading her thoughts.  “But I know I am right.  Here are the woods and the steep hill, just as grandma has described them a hundred times.  This is Indian Chasm.”

The girls looked at her curiously.  Betty had not told them the story, believing that Alice and Norma should have that sole right.  Now Norma rapidly sketched the outlines for them and they listened breathlessly, for surely this true story was more thrilling than any piece of fiction, however highly colored.

“I never heard of anything so romantic!” was Libbie’s comment.

To which Bobby retorted with cousinly severity: 

“Romantic?  Where do you see anything romantic in a band of Indians scalping a peaceful white family?”

“Oh, Bobby!” protested Norma, laughing.  “They didn’t scalp grandma.  They stole everything she had.”

“And is all that stuff down there now?” asked Constance Howard, round-eyed.  “Perhaps if we look we can see something.”

There was a concerted rush to the chasm’s edge, and the eight girls plumped down flat on their stomachs, determined to see whatever there was to be seen.

The sides of the earth fell away sharply, down, down.  Betty shouted, and the empty echo of her voice came back to her.

“The ground’s so shaly and crumbly,” she said thoughtfully, “that it would be impossible to let a man down with a rope—­the earth would cave in and bury him.”

“I think I see a diamond,” reported Libbie.  “Don’t you see something glittering down there?”

“Can’t even see the bottom,” said Bobby curtly.  “Much less a diamond.  Oh, girls, to think of those valuables at the bottom of a chasm like this and none of us able to think up a way to get ’em out.”

“Well, lots of people have tried,” said Alice reasonably.  “If grown-up men couldn’t salvage ’em for grandma, I guess it’s nothing to our discredit that we can’t get them.”

“We might push Libbie in,” suggested Bobby wickedly.  “Then she could tell us how deep it is.”

This had the effect of sending Libbie scurrying away from the dangerous place, and the others followed her more slowly to resume the search for nuts.

“I wish we could think of a way, Norma, dear,” said Betty.