“Never mind, J.W., you will grow if you will only wait,” laughed Jack.  “We were all little fellows once.”

“What sort of place is this, anyhow?” asked the smaller boy, looking about him.  “There are woods and rocks, and down there I can see that stump of a mast.  I wonder if we could see more of her by——­”

He was walking on, looking at the mast sticking out of water more than at the ground at his feet when suddenly Jack noticed that he was right on the edge of a hole just discernible in the tall grass.

He darted forward, and caught the boy’s arm just as he was about to step into this hole without seeing it, and pulled him back.

“Look out, Jesse W., or you’ll go in!” he cried.  “You don’t know how deep that place is nor where it will land you.”

“H’m!  I never noticed it.  It does seem deep, doesn’t it?  I wonder how far down it goes, and what’s at the end?  Water, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Jack, “but you might have had a bad fall, my boy.  You don’t want to go star-gazing like that in strange places.  You never know what may be in the way.  Always look where you are going.”

“Yes, that’s good advice, but I wonder if there is anything down there anyhow?  Do you suppose we could get down?”

“Possibly,” returned Jack thoughtfully, “but I imagine it is a pretty good job to get down there and a bigger one to get back, and nothing down there anyhow.”

“You can’t tell without going down,” said the younger boy wisely, as he knelt on the edge of the hole, and looked down.  “Have you got a pocket light with you?  We might tell something with that.”

Jack parted the tall grass, and just then the sun shone out brightly, as the breeze blew aside the branches, and a broad track of sunlight was let into the hole.

“It does not go straight down,” said Dick, who was now at Jack’s side.  “In fact, I don’t think it is as steep as the path we came up.  We might go down and investigate.”

“Yes, but what would there be there when we got down?” asked the other half impatiently.  “We ran the risk of breaking a leg or an arm just for the sake of exploring a hole in the ground, and get nothing out of it.  If there was anything there, now——­”

“Yon don’t know till you look, as Jesse W. just remarked, and there might be something there after all.  Some of Captain Kidd’s treasure, for instance.”

“Nonsense!  You are full of Captain Kidd’s treasure, and so are half the boys.  You won’t find anything down there, and you will have your trouble for your pains.”

“I’m going to look just for the fun of it, anyhow,” said Dick, “although it would be very convenient to have a light as J.W. suggests.  Another time we can bring one.”

The sun shone more strongly into the hole, and Dick began to descend, using a stout stick, which he had broken from a tree near at hand, to assist him in going down.