It was quite a scramble down to the stream bed, and, once on the bed,
we went down stream perhaps for a hundred feet. And then we came to the
great hole. There was no warning of the existence of the hole, nor
was it a hole in the common sense of the word. One crawled through
tight-locked briers and branches, and found oneself on the very edge,
peering out and down through a green screen. A couple of hundred feet in
length and width, it was half of that in depth. Possibly because of
some fault that had occurred when the knolls were flung together, and
certainly helped by freakish erosion, the hole had been scooped out in
the course of centuries by the wash of water. Nowhere did the raw earth
appear. All was garmented by vegetation, from tiny maiden-hair and
gold-back ferns to mighty redwood and Douglas spruces. These great trees
even sprang out from the walls of the hole. Some leaned over at angles
as great as forty-five degrees, though the majority towered straight up
from the soft and almost perpendicular earth walls.

It was a perfect hiding-place. No one ever came there, not even the
village boys of Glen Ellen. Had this hole existed in the bed of a canyon
a mile long, or several miles long, it would have been well known. But
this was no canyon. From beginning to end the length of the stream was
no more than five hundred yards. Three hundred yards above the hole the
stream took its rise in a spring at the foot of a flat meadow. A hundred
yards below the hole the stream ran out into open country, joining the
main stream and flowing across rolling and grass-covered land.

My companion took a turn of the rope around a tree, and with me fast on
the other end lowered away. In no time I was on the bottom. And in but
a short while he had carried all the articles from the cache and lowered
them down to me. He hauled the rope up and hid it, and before he went
away called down to me a cheerful parting.