precaution, but he felt better. He would have to be cautious now, he told himself. What to guard against he had not the remotest idea; still, he would have to take care. It was the very vagueness of the enemy which troubled him most. If it were a man, he would have known easily enough some of the things to do. But this enemy was unnamable, supernatural.
It was about 9 o'clock in the evening when Pearson heard one of the mules down at the bam kicking its stall door. He was a farmer, and knew well enough that this might mean a valuable farm animal would break its leg if permitted to continue its foolish ways. He went out to the rear gate. The mule had escaped from its stall, dashed out of the lot by leaping the low fence into the tobacco, and was now snorting and cavorting about among the plants in great show of brutish agitation. He called to the beast, but with only indifferent results. Meanwhile he looked about, among the plants, and in the weeds and shadows back of the stable, for some signs of what had caused this unwonted disturbance. The mules were not in the habit of breaking out of their stalls and galloping about in this manner.
He clambered the fence, still speaking gently to the mule. The beast made a lateral swing down into a hol¬ low at the spring course below the house. A short distance down the drain was one of the sinkholes characteristic of this cavernous limestone country. The frightened mule disappeared around the clump of bushes which fringed this opening.
Pearson could not have explained with any certainty afterward just what actually did occur. He had a vague impression of a dim figure that darted from out of the undergrowth and cauarht him from the rear; but neither his sight nor feeling could be relied upon. He suffered no sensation of physical contact, much less of pain. All he knew was that he suddenly found his steps arrested, his body sliding through the dust and dry leaves and brush which clung about the edge of the hole. Nothing he did served to stay his fall. He went tumbling head first into the hole.
It seemed that he fell into the very depths of the earth. In his frantic struggles to break his descent, he had scant idea of distance, but he dimly sensed the depth of the hole to be a hundred feet. He landed at the bottom finally with plenty of bruises but no broken bones, friction with the narrow walls aiding him to slack his speed.
He stood in absolute darkness. He stretched forth his hand cautiously, finding a continuation of the passage in a horizontal direction. The walls were smooth, and the passageway of a size comfortably to admit his body.
He had spent many an hour in exploring the caves of the vicinity; Mammoth Cave, a few miles away, he had known all of his life. When his first weakness had passed, he began crawling on hands and knees along the tube. It seemed to follow the general direction of the river bluff, a half mile away. He had never heard of a cave opening out on the face of the bluff; still, there could be something of the sort. Clearly he could expect to get out no other way, since escape back up through the sinkhole was impossible.
At times he paused and listened, thinking that something, perhaps the thing that had tripped him up, was following. But no sound reached his ears. It was a premonition, that was all—much more a spirit than anything resembling an actuality.
After a hundred yards he entered a cavernous chamber. The place was cool but the air was dry. Away off somewhere he could hear the dull roar of water. He surmised that the stream was Lost River, whose course lay for the most part in the bowels of
