The Mystery at Bob-White Cave

are piling up in the west. Don’t you hear thunder? We’d better go.”
    Brian, the serious member of the Bob-Whites and their acknowledged leader, took one look at the sky and issued an order to head for home immediately.
    The sun had disappeared behind a bank of angry clouds. A wind came up through the silence—a silence more ominous than the rolling thunder that accented it. The sky in the west was a sullen green along the horizon. Tree branches, caught in the wind, swept low. Turtledoves stopped their cooing. Katydids and crickets no longer chirped, but the crows kept up their ratchety cawing. A frightened rabbit looked out from behind a bush. Jacob paid no attention to it but stood beside Jim, head down and tail between his legs, while the wind whipped his short hair.
    The Bob-Whites scurried up the path. The wind increased its fury, and the rain came down in sheets. Lightning cut crooked paths across the sky. Trixie stayed close to Jim. Honey, her face white with fright, cringed under the sheltering arm Brian put around her. Mart, forging ahead up the steep path, came to a sudden halt.
    “The wind has been here ahead of us. We can’t ever get over this big fallen tree!” he cried. “What’ll we do? The lightning is bad—real bad!”
    “Around to the left! Deploy! Hurry!” Brian ordered. “And, Mart, no more alarms, please. There’s no real danger.”
    “We’ll find shelter as soon as we can,” Jim called. He had hidden for days in the big Catskill woods back home, trying to keep out of his cruel stepfather’s sight, before Honey and Trixie found him and Honey’s parents adopted him. Skilled as a woodsman, he firmly took over from Brian.
    “Straight ahead!” he called. “Keep going the way Brian started us, toward the cliffs overhanging the river! There may be shelter there. Hurry!”
    They were all soaked to the skin, for the rain came down in buckets, undeterred by the heavy foliage above them.
    Suddenly a haven opened up where the sandstone ledge on which they were walking curved past a cavernous opening.
    “Get in there quickly!” Jim called. As he pulled Trixie to shelter and hurried the Bob-Whites inside, a big tree crashed near the entrance.
    The inside of the cave was pitch-black. They couldn’t see one another—couldn’t see a thing except a faint blur of light through the cave opening.
    Safe from the storm’s fury, they shook themselves free of water.
    Habitually, they never went anyplace without their flashlights, a lesson they had learned from experience in the Catskill woods. Now they shone their lights in circles to explore their surroundings. A room perhaps fifty feet long and fifty feet wide spread about them. The ceiling, high enough that they could easily stand upright, sloped toward the back till it reached the ground.
    “It’s just a big hole in a cliff,” Jim said, “and a pretty lucky one for all of us, I’d say.”
    Trixie moved her light quickly over the damp clay ground, along the side walls, here and there over the ceiling, then back again to the ground. Finally she held the beam on a corner in which a pile of bones stood out in the light.
    Jim went closer to investigate. “I don’t like the looks of this. They’re bones of little animals—squirrels, raccoons....”
    “Probably trapped in here and died,” Mart said. “Don’t you think so, Brian?”
    Brian moved closer. “No, I don’t. I don’t think Jim thinks so, either. We’re in some animal’s den.”
    “A catamount!” Honey cried. “Remember that one that scared us so in the woods at home? Let’s get out of here. It’ll be here soon, and we’ll all be killed! Won’t we, Trixie?”
    “What did you say?” Trixie asked. Her mind wasn’t on the storm or on a catamount or on a pile of bare bones. She was looking for a sinkhole where a “ghost” fish might linger. With her flashlight, she had hunted out every inch of the big room. “There’s not a sign of water in here. I’ll never find the fish here!”
    “You do have a single-track mind,” Mart said. “Did you even notice the storm before we came in here?”
    “Of course I did, silly. I have a lot on my mind, though. If you don’t want that reward money, I do. I’m not overlooking anything.”
    “I think this cavern is neat,” Brian said. “Look at the way my flashlight brings out the color of the rocks!”
    “Yeah,” Jim said. “Gosh, look at this one!”
    “I don’t want all of us to be eaten alive, even if we