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Title: The Adam Chaser

Author: B. M. Bower

Release Date: April 19, 2022 [eBook #67834]

Language: English

Produced by: Roger Frank and Sue Clark.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADAM CHASER ***





THE ADAM CHASER

By B. M. Bower

Author of “Black Thunder,” “The Meadowlark Name,” Etc.

    [Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the September 7, 1925
    issue of The Popular Magazine.]

    Treasures of the storied past, records of prehistoric settlements
    of the American Indian, lure a young archaeologist, Professor
    Abington, to the Sonora caves of Arizona where fate plays him
    a grim trick, and makes him arbiter of the destinies of living men.




CHAPTER I--A BAD HOMBRE


Halfway up a long cañon that cut a six-mile gash through rugged
mountains thinly pock-marked with prospect holes, the radiator cap
of John Abington’s car blew off with a pop like amateur home-brew.

For a matter of a minute, perhaps, that particular brand of
automobile developed a lively hot-water geyser. Followed a brief
period of steaming, and after that it stalled definitely and set
square in the trail which ran through deep sandy gravel and rock
rubble--a hot car and a sulky one, if you know what I mean.

Abington harried the starter with vicious jabs of his heel, then
crawled reluctantly out into the blistering wind which felt as if it
were driving down the sunlight with sharp needle points of heat that
stung and smarted the skin where they struck.

The canteens were buried deep under much camp paraphernalia, a
circumstance which gave occasion for a few minutes of eloquent
monologue. Curiously, the driver’s vituperation was directed neither
at the car nor the wind nor the heat, but at an absent individual
whom he called “Shorty”--and at another named Pete.

Considerable luggage was shifted before the canteens were finally
excavated from the floor of the tonneau; both canteens, because the
first one was so completely empty that it made no sound when
Abington impatiently shook it.

He was standing beside the car, mechanically sloshing a pint or so
of water in the second grimy, flat-bottomed canteen, when a
dust-covered roadster came coasting down the four-per-cent grade of
the cañon half a mile or so away. He glanced at the approaching car,
set the canteen in the sand and helped himself to a cigarette from a
silver-trimmed leather case. Abington was leaning against the rear
fender in the narrow bit of shade when the roadster came down upon
him, slowed with a squealing of dry brakes and stopped perforce. In
the rocks and deep sand that bordered the road a caterpillar truck
could scarcely have driven around the stalled car.

“In trouble?” A perspiring tanned face leaned out, squinting ahead
into the sun through desert-wrinkled eyelids.

“None whatever,” Abington calmly replied, smiling to make the words
cheerful. “I’m waiting here for the car to cool off a bit. I hope
you’re not in a hurry?”

The driver of the roadster slanted a quick glance at his companion,
who slumped sidewise in the seat with his hat pulled low over his
eyes.

“Kinda. Got plenty of water?” This in a hopeful tone, which his next
sentence explained. “I’m kinda short, myself, but I’ll hit Mina
before long, so I ain’t worrying. How much you going to need? Half a
canteen do you any good?”

The stalled driver walked forward with a loose, negligent stride
which nevertheless covered the ground with amazing ease. From under
straight, black brows his eyes looked forth with apparent
negligence, though they saw a great deal with a flicking glance or
two.

“It might take me back to where I can fill my canteens, sheriff. I
don’t suppose there’s a quart of water in the radiator, and
everything’s empty. My fault. I discharged a couple of men I had
with me, and I should have been on my guard against some such trick
as this. As it was, I failed to stand over them while they unloaded
their plunder from the car. At any rate, here I am for the present.”

“Tough luck. I’ll let you have what water I’ve got, but it ain’t
much. She kept heating on me, climbing the summit. How far you
going?”

“Back to Mina. I want to find those two fellows I let off there.”
Abington’s questing black eyes rested on the roadster’s other
occupant, shifted to the driver’s hard yet not unkindly face, and he
waved the cigarette significantly.

“Better give this fellow a drink, before I empty the canteen.” He
nodded toward the slack figure. “And if you’ll pardon the
suggestion, sheriff, I’d turn him loose for a bit. Pretty rough
riding, even when you’ve got all your hands and feet to hang on by.”

The other gave a short, apologetic laugh.

“Say, this feller’s plumb mean--that’s why I got him shackled that
way. Car broke down, the other side of Tonopah, and I’m taking him
through alone. He’s a slippery cuss. Had us chasin’ him off and on
for two years. I can’t take any chances.”

“You’re not.” If the tone was ironic the eyes were friendly enough.
“But the man looks sick. A drink of water and a smoke won’t make him
any more dangerous, I imagine.”

“Yeah, I know he acts sick, and he looks sick. But it might be a
stall, at that,” The officer turned and eyed his prisoner
doubtfully. “I don’t want to be hard on anybody--and I don’t want to
be bashed over the bean and throwed out on the desert to die,
neither! She’s a lonely road--I’ll tell anybody.”

For all that, he got out, unlocked the tool box on the running
board, took out a smaller box of screws, bolts, nuts and cotter
pins, fumbled within it with thumb and finger and finally produced a
small flat key.

“Never pays to be in a hurry to git a pair of handcuffs open,” he
muttered to Abington. “This way’s safe as I can make it. He’s a bad
hombre.”

Abington nodded understanding and stood back while the deputy
sheriff walked around the car and freed his passenger from the
handcuffs which were fastened behind his back.

For an appreciable space the fellow drooped indifferently where he
was, not even taking the trouble to rub his chafed wrists, though
they must have pained him considerably, swollen and discolored as
they were with the snug steel bands and the awkward position forced
upon him.

“Have a drink of water,” Abington suggested, not too kindly. More as
if he were speaking to a man who was free to go where he pleased.

The fellow looked up at him, nodded and lifted a hand shaking from
cramp. Abington unscrewed the cap and steadied the canteen to the
man’s mouth. He drank thirstily, pushed the canteen away with the
back of his hand, lifted his hat and drew a palm across his flushed
forehead where the veins stood out like heavy cords drawn just under
the skin.

“Thanks!” He gave Abington another glance, a gleam in his eyes as of
throttled speech.

“Have a smoke. Here, keep the case while we’re getting the car
started.” Abington glanced at the officer. “You’ve no objection, I
suppose?”

“Hell, no! What do you take me for? Just because I use some
precautions against being brained while I’m busy driving don’t mean
I’m hard boiled.” He sent a measuring glance toward either side of
the straight-walled cañon. Within half a mile there was no cover for
a man, and the cliffs rose sheer. “You can get out if you want to,
Bill,” he said to the prisoner. “Guess you won’t go far with them
leg irons.”

“Thanks.” The prisoner’s voice was perfunctory, and he seemed in no
great hurry to avail himself of the privilege. While the others
walked to the stalled car--the deputy watching over his
shoulder--the prisoner sat where he was, smoking a cigarette from
Abington’s leather-and-silver case.

The stalled car refused to start. That mechanical condition, which
is called freezing, held the cylinders locked fast until such time
as the expansion subsided, and in the fierce heat of that cañon the
motor cooled very slowly. Abington suggested coasting backward to
the first place where a turnout had been provided.

“There’s a turnout, back here a couple of hundred yards or such a
matter. If you can give me a push over this little hump, I think the
car will roll down the road easily enough,” he explained. “I’ll have
to keep it in the road, sheriff, or I could manage alone.”

The deputy rather liked being called sheriff, and he was anxious to
reach Carson City that evening with his prisoner. Until Abington’s
car moved out of the way, he himself was stalled, since he could not
move forward more than the hundred feet which separated the two
cars. There was no other road down that cañon.

“If Bill Jonathan wasn’t feeling so tough, I’d take off the hobbles
and make him get out and help,” he grumbled, looking back at the
roadster. “But I guess he’s sick, all right. He ain’t left the car
yet. Well, you get in and hold ’er in the ruts, Mister”

“My name is Abington. I’m an archaeologist--”

“That right? My name’s Park. I’m sure glad to meet you, Doctor
Abington. Heard a lot about you and them petrified animals and
things you’ve been digging up. Got the brake off? All right--”

But the best he could do, just at first, was to rock the car a few
inches each way. Between shoves he looked over his shoulder. The
prisoner apparently preferred the shade of the car to the heat of
the sun, and Park soon ceased to worry about him. Midway between
Tonopah and Mina would be a poor spot to choose for a walk away,
even if the man were free to walk, he reflected.

However desperate he might be, Bill Jonathan was no fool. He knew
well enough that Park would shoot at the first hint of trouble. The
deputy grunted and turned his attention to the work at hand.

Abington got out and helped claw the hot loose sand away from behind
the rear wheels, got in again and steered while Park braced himself
and heaved against the front fender. The car moved backward nearly a
foot, and the two grinned triumphantly at one another.

“Next time--I’ll get her--Doctor Abington!” the deputy puffed,
glancing over his shoulder as he mopped trickles of sweat from face
and neck. A thin wreath of cigarette smoke waved out from the
prisoner’s side of the roadster, and Park grinned at Abington behind
the wheel.

“Hope you’re well fixed for cigarettes!” He chuckled good-humoredly.
“Bill’s trying to smoke enough to last till he gets outa the pen,
looks like.”

“He’s welcome,” Abington returned, a smile hidden under his pointed
black beard. “I’ve plenty more.”

“Just as you say. All right, let’s give her another shove. Gosh,
it’s hot!”

Grunting and straining, Park moved the car three feet backward to
where a nest of small stones halted it again. Encouraged by the
small progress, the two knelt again behind the rear wheels and began
to paw a clear path in the gravel. The “hump,” one of those small
ridges which characterized desert roads, would be passed within the
next six feet.

At the precise moment when Park was kneeling with his back half
turned from his own car, he heard his starter whir with an instant
roar of the motor just under a full feed of gas.

The roadster shot backward up the trail, guided evidently by guess
and a helpful divinity, since Bill Jonathan’s head never once
appeared outside the car to watch the trail behind him. Park jumped
up, pulled his old-fashioned range-model Colt and fixed six shots in
rapid succession, evidently realizing that he must get them all in
before the car was out of range. With the sixth shot the glass was
seen to fly from a headlight, then the hammer clicked futilely
against an empty shell.

Park swore as he started running up the trail after the car, the
driver’s head now plainly in sight as he leaned out and watched the
road. A good fifteen miles an hour he was making in reverse; and
unless a car came down the cañon and stopped him as Park had been
halted, for the simple reason that he could not turn out, Bill
Jonathan seemed in a fair way of making his escape.

“The damn fool! He can’t get far with them leg irons on!” Park
grunted, coming to a stop where the roadster had stood. “That’s what
I get for being so damn soft hearted! I told you he was a bad
hombre, Doctor Abington!”




CHAPTER II--SYMBOLS OF MYSTERY


Abington walked forward a few steps, stooped and picked up his
cigarette case from the hot sand of the trail.

“Spencer founded his whole philosophy on the premise that there is a
soul of goodness even in things evil,” he observed with the little
hidden smile tucked into the corners of his black-bearded lips.
“Your man has made off with your car, but he very thoughtfully
returned my cigarette case--not altogether empty, either. Not
knowing I have a full carton in the car, he has left us a cigarette
apiece; which proves the soul of goodness within the evil. Will you
have a smoke, sheriff?”

“Might as well, I guess,” Park grumbled, his eyes on the departing
car. “This is a hell of a note! Doctor Abington, what we’ve got to
do is make it in to Mina and get word out to the different towns
before Bill can make Tonopah or Goldfield.

“Thunder! Who’d ever think he’d try to pull off a stunt like that? I
was going to take the irons off his legs, but I kinda had a hunch
not to. Never dreamed he’d pull out with the car while his legs was
shackled; did you?”

“I’m afraid my mind was quite taken up with my own problem.”
Abington confessed in a slightly apologetic tone. “I’m not
accustomed to chasing live men, you know. It’s the dead ones I’m
interested in, and the longer they’ve been dead the better.

“Nevertheless, sheriff, I realize your predicament. If there’s a
long-distance telephone in Mina you can intercept the fellow at
Tonopah, I should think.” He was thoughtfully turning the cigarette
case over in his fingers as if his habit was to admire its glossy
brown leather and the silver filigree. Now he slipped it into his
pocket and turned to retrace his steps.

“I suppose we ought to get the old boat headed down the trail,
sheriff. Your prisoner went off with your canteen, you know, so
we’ll have to pet my motor along as best we can. But she’ll roll
down the cañon in neutral, and then we’ll drive it as far as we
can--which may not be far.

“At the turnout, down the road here, I’ll get the car headed in the
other direction, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we beat your man in,
after all. Will he have gas enough to take him to Tonopah?”

“Lord, yes! I filled the tank plumb full, and it’s one of them old
thirty-gallon tanks. But somebody’ll maybe run across him trying to
fill the radiator or something, and see the leg irons and take him
in. Tires ain’t none too good--maybe he’ll have tire trouble. I sure
hope so,” he added unnecessarily.

Abington, leaning to push at the side of the car while he kept one
hand on the steering wheel, did not answer. Park added his weight at
the front fender, straining until his gloomy countenance went
purple. The car rolled over the hump, and Abington hopped nimbly to
the running board, watched his chance and straddled in behind the
wheel.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Some time was lost in negotiating the turn. After that, coasting
down the road with a dead engine cooled the cylinders considerably.
By skillful management Abington was able to start the motor and use
what power was needed to drive the car up over certain small knolls
near the foot of the cañon.

At the edge of the long valley, a hill gave them momentum sufficient
to carry them well down toward a white, leprous expanse, called Soda
Lake, with a tiny settlement a few miles beyond. Here, in the chuck
holes of the soda-incrusted lake bed, the car refused to go any
farther without power, and power in that grilling heat required a
full radiator.

Even so, the two made fair time walking, and at the settlement
Abington was able to hire a man to haul water out to the car. Also,
Park was successful in getting wires through to the sheriff’s office
at Tonopah, and also at Goldfield, the only points he believed Bill
Jonathan would attempt to reach.

“If you like, sheriff, we can follow up your man at once,” Abington
suggested when Park came out of the telegraph office looking less
worried. “I’m willing to postpone the pleasure of chastising Shorty
and Pete, and drive you straight through to Tonopah. Water is the
only thing I needed for the trip, and the man is waiting out here
with a full supply, ready to drive us back to my car. At the most we
will be only three hours behind the fugitive and, as you say, he
can’t do much with leg irons on.

“He’ll need to have a remarkable run of luck if he reaches there
ahead of us. For instance, your motor had been heating, and you had
only half a canteen of water. As I remember the road, there’s a
long, hard climb for several miles beyond that cañon. He’ll be
compelled to fill up with water at that spring just over the summit;
one stop, at least, where he will have enough awkward walking to
hold him there twice as long as a man with his legs free. So--”

“Say, Doctor Abington, you sure can figure things out!” Park grinned
while he bit the end off a forlorn-looking cigar he had just bought
at the little store. “You ought to be a detective.”

“I am. I’ve been trying to detect the origin of the human race, for
years now,” Abington smiled. “It’s the same kind of figuring brought
down to modern conditions. If you’re ready, sheriff, we’ll get
underway.”

So back they went, roaring up the long rough trail to the cañon and
on to Tonopah. They did not meet a soul on the way, nor did they
overtake Bill Jonathan and the roadster. Neither did they glimpse
anywhere a sign of his turning aside from the main highway, though
Park’s eyes watered from watching intently the trail.

Abington proved to be a scientifically reckless driver and a silent
one withal. Within an incredibly short time he landed a grateful
deputy at the sheriff’s office in Tonopah, bade him an unperturbed
adieu, drove his car into a garage and established himself
comfortably in the best hotel the town afforded--all with the brisk,
purposeful air of one who is clearing away small matters so that he
may take up the business which really engrosses his mind.

In his room at the hotel John Abington dragged the most comfortable
chair directly under the two-globe chandelier, lighted a cigarette
from the pasteboard box which he took from his pocket, and pulled
out the leather cigarette case as if this was what he had been all
along preparing to do.

“Got a tack from the upholstery, no doubt, for a stylus,” he mused.
“Old car--binding probably loose on the door pocket--that’s where it
gives first. H’m! That’s what he waited for. Knew he meant to
escape, of course--saw it in his eyes. H’m! Let’s see, now.”

Abington blew a cloud of smoke and thoughtfully examined the case as
he turned it over slowly in his hand, just as he had done when he
picked it up in the cañon road.

As he studied it his lips moved in that silent musing speech which
was his habit --the black beard offering perfect concealment for his
soundless whisperings.

“H’m! Clever of him--hieroglyphics adapted to code work. Let’s see.
The old Babylonian ‘chain of evil’--three links, meaning ‘not so
bad.’ Following that, a man. Humph! That’s Bill himself, no doubt.

“Nest--h’m!--that’s Egyptian; the old Egyptian symbol denoting the
number of days in a journey, but with the Babylonian and Manchurian
moon month at the end. Probably meant a month’s journey, and didn’t
know the sign for it. Bill, my lad, you show intelligence above the
average layman, at least.

“Now, what’s all this? Water sign, mountains, stopping place-- Bill
descended to picture writing there, I see! That’s the mountain
across from my camp where I took Bill in and fed him--gave him my
best hiking boots, too, by Jove! My camp by the river-- Bill, you
are ingenious!

“Without a doubt you wish me to understand that within a month you
will be at my old camp by the river--counting on more food and more
boots, perhaps! H’m! I don’t just know about that.

[Illustration: Bill’s message, written in hieroglyphics such as are
found among the rock carvings of Nevada.]

“Don’t see how you are going to make it. Handicap too heavy. Doubt
whether I myself could overcome the obstacles--leg irons, officers
on the watch, posses on the trail, three hundred miles to go-- Bill,
old fellow, if you make it you’ll prove yourself a man worth
helping! You won’t get half the distance--but if you do, you may
have my next-best boots and welcome!”

Abington turned the case over, held it closer to the light, frowned
and gave a faint whistle at what he saw. He had supposed that the
message had been repeated here as a precaution against his failure
to notice the barely discernible markings in the leather on the
other side.

But as he peered sharply at the fine indentations his eyes
brightened with interest. For although the river and the
stopping-place symbols were repeated, and the string of tiny circles
which signified the number of days’ journeying, the plural sign was
there just below them. At the end of the journey, mountains--but
they were indicated by the conventional, premodified Manchurian
symbol and, close by, the sign of a mummy.

“What the deuce!” breathed Abington, pulling black eyebrows
together. “He’s blundered there--maybe means he’ll leave my camp
only in custody. No, by Jove! That can’t be it, either.”

For a long time he sat motionless except when he turned the
cigarette case for a renewed scrutiny of the other side. The message
that had seemed so simple presented an unexpected little twist of
mystery.

Bill Jonathan, pursued by the chain of evil, meant to journey for
perhaps a month and arrive at John Abington’s camp in the mountains
that bordered the river. That much seemed fairly plain, and one
would logically expect no further information at present.

But there was more to it, apparently. Bill had not sat in that
roadster idly scratching hieroglyphics on the cigarette case of an
archaeologist just to pass the time away. Meaning to escape in the
car, uncertain too of the number of minutes at his disposal, he must
have grudged every second of delay while he worked out his message.

Abington permitted his cigarette to go out while he brooded over
those crude lines. His thoughts harked back to the time, four months
before, when Bill Jonathan had come limping into camp, crippled with
stone bruises from traveling the rough granite hills in thin-soled
shoes worn to tattered leather. He had been hungry, too, by the
manner in which he wolfed his first meal whenever he thought
Abington was not looking his way.

He had not told his name, and Abington had taken the hint and asked
no questions. Bill had called himself a prospector, said he had an
outfit back in the hills and had come down to Abington’s camp to see
if he could rustle a pair of boots and a little tobacco. A likable
fellow, Abington had found him; one of those rare individuals who
can display an intelligent interest in the other fellow’s subject.

Abington at that time had been searching out and recording with a
camera all the ancient rock carvings along the river. While Bill’s
feet were healing he had wanted to know all about the various
symbols and their meanings. He had told Abington of two or three
cañons where writings could be found, and he had discussed with
Abington the possibility of finding petrified human remains--

“By Jove!” Abington ejaculated, straightening suddenly in his chair.
“I wonder if that is not what he means! That we’ll both journey to a
spot in the mountains where I can find my fossilized man!”

The idea once implanted in his mind, Abington could not seem to get
rid of it. Without a doubt, that was the meaning Bill had meant to
convey; that he had found the fossil man which would mean more to
Abington than a gold mine--for such is the peculiar point of view
held by scientists of a certain school.

“Told him that mummy symbol indicated a burial--remember we
discussed it. He recognized the sign from having seen one on a rock.
I told him it undoubtedly meant that some one had been buried there.
H’m! Nothing else he could mean. Wasn’t sitting in that car drawing
marks for fun. Couldn’t write a message. Afraid Park might pick up
the case, no doubt. Too bad--handicapped too heavily. Never will
make it.”

Nevertheless Abington loitered for four days in Tonopah, though he
had no business to hold him there. He heard nothing of an escaped
convict being captured in that part of the country, so finally went
his way.

He had meant to hire more men and carry his explorations over into
Utah, but the sporting instinct for once prevailed over scientific
zeal. He still believed that Bill would never make it--that the
“chain of evil” was too strong. But being an archaeologist, he had
learned the sublime lesson of a patient, plodding persistence that
simply ignores failure. Abington returned alone to a field already
pretty thoroughly covered, and rëestablished his old camp by the
river. There he sat himself down to wait, with a brooding patience
not unlike the eternal hills that hemmed him in.




CHAPTER III--ON THE JUMP


Into the firelight Bill Jonathan came walking one evening, barely
within the month he had given himself in the symbolic message. Face
drawn and sallow, eyes staring out from under his hat brim with a
glassy dullness born of hunger, fever and fatigue mingled, perhaps,
with that never-sleeping fear which dogs the soul of the hunted. But
none of this showed in his manner, nor in his greeting which gave
the arrival a casual note.

“Hello, professor! Got my message, I see. Well, I had one merry heck
of a trip, but here I am.” He dropped down where he could lean
against Abington’s favorite camp boulder--lean there at ease or
crawl swiftly out of sight behind the broken ledge, Abington
observed with that negligent, flicking glance of his. Another glance
dropped briefly to Bill’s ankles, and Bill laughed wryly.

“Didn’t think I meant to wear them things permanent, did you,
professor? Hell, I ain’t no Aztec princess, going around with
anklets on that’d sink a whale. No, I was up at the old Honey Boy
Mine, in the blacksmith shop, setting on a bench with one foot in a
vise, filing faster than a buzz saw when I heard you folks go past,
down in the gulch. At least, I s’pose it was you folks, because it
was a cinch nobody would pass you in the cañon, and I had it doped
out you’d roll down to where you could get water, and come chasing
me up. Hauled my nursemaid on into Tonopah, I’ll bet!”

“I did that.” Abington smiled, tossing Bill his cigarette case
before opening a can of baked beans while the coffee heated. “I
really didn’t think you’d make it, though. Handicap too heavy.”

Bill accepted the cigarette case, pausing to eye with prideful
interest the markings. He lighted a cigarette and relishfully
inhaled three gratified mouthfuls before he spoke.

“If you mean them irons, I didn’t wear ’em long. Just till I could
get the bus up to the old Honey Boy. Wonder you didn’t spot the
place where I turned off--maybe you did. It was on your side the
road.” He saw Abington nod, and grinned appreciatively. “Well, it
rained some that night, and that helped dim the tracks. Nobody came
near the mine; not while I was there, anyhow.

“Friend Park had a fair lot of grub in the back of the car, and I
rustled a little more at the mine. Waited till dark and beat it back
down the cañon and over to Bishop. Made Randsburg, drove the car
over a cliff into a brushy cañon just before I got there, walked in
with an old bed roll I’d fixed up at the Honey Boy, as good a
blanket stiff as the next one! Worked there a week and blew out
again, first pay day--hit it just right, as it happened.

“Hoboed to San Berdoo, doubled back to Needles--hanging tight to my
blanket roll and my time check to show I’d worked not so long ago.
And I’ve been hoofing it up the river since then.”

Abington nodded again and pulled the coffeepot off the coals, using
a crooked stick for the purpose. It may have occurred to him that
crooked sticks are sometimes more useful than straight ones, for he
gave Bill Jonathan an unhurried measuring look as he extended a cup
of black coffee.

“That mummy sign, Bill. Did you mean by that you had discovered more
ancient writings, or did you by any chance refer to skeletal
remains?”

Bill took a great swallow of coffee and set down the cup. His tired
eyes brightened in the fire glow. “Maybe you’d call ’em skeletons,
professor--I’d say they’re rock. All you want. Thought you’d like to
take a look at ’em. So when we met up with you on the way to Carson
I made up my mind I wouldn’t wait till I was turned loose. You might
be to hell an’ gone by that time, or some nosey Adam chaser might
run acrost ’em. I seen last spring how you’ve got your heart set on
finding the granddaddy of all men, or some such thing, and I’d kinda
hate to see anybody beat you to it. So I made my git-away in order
to show you where they’re at.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Having thus explained the matter to his own satisfaction, Bill
forthwith began to empty the can of beans in a manner best pleasing
to himself.

John Abington poked absently at the fire, gently rapping upon a
burning juniper branch until it broke under the blows, spurting
sparks as it fell into the coals.

“Adam chasers, as you call it, are not so numerous in this country,”
he said softly. “Not nearly so numerous as--er--deputy sheriffs.”

Bill Jonathan leaned sidewise, reached the coffeepot and refilled
his cup. “Yeah, I get you,” he said finally. “But this is wild
country we’re going into. I ain’t taking such an awful chance, now I
got this far. I was duckin’ sheriffs when I found these stone men.
I’ve got to go on duckin’ sheriffs anyway--that, or else let ’em
ketch me and put me in for five or ten years. It’s six one way and a
half dozen the other.

“This is how I’ve got it doped out, professor. You and me throw in
together. I’ll show you Adam--or his wife’s folks, anyway--and you
furnish me with grub and tobacco so I don’t have to show up where I
can be nabbed. I’ll draw on you for supplies and keep along close
without trailing right with you. So you won’t get in bad if it’s
found out I’m in the hills.” He looked across the fire at Abington.
“How’s it strike you, professor?”

Over and over Abington had considered this very point during his
month of waiting. It all depended on Bill himself, he had decided.
Some men are so constituted that preying upon society is second
nature to them. Others fall afoul of the law through no real
criminal intent. There is a vast difference between the two types,
Abington knew. It all depended on Bill.

“I never did function as guardian angel to escaped convicts,”
Abington said with brutal directness. “Laws are better kept than
broken, as you will probably agree, and it ill becomes a loyal
citizen to help any man dodge the penalty for his misdeeds. On the
other hand, even lawbreakers may contribute something to the general
welfare of the world. Discovering the skeletal relics of a man of
the Cretaceous period may not materially help to liquidate the
national debt, but it would be a priceless contribution to the
scientific knowledge of the human race.”

“Yeah, and I can go on and finish that argument, myself. I can’t do
no more damage to society while I’m herdin’ with the coyotes, and if
I can help you find what you’re lookin’ for, that’s better than
loafin’ around doing time in Carson. So you won’t be doing nothing
worse than taking a boarder off the hands of the State. That’s about
the way you doped it out, ain’t it, professor?”

“Essentially the same, yes,” Abington admitted. “I’m glad you have
so thorough an understanding of the matter. I think if your offense
was not too great I could perhaps get you paroled and placed in my
charge, but that would take time and-- They’ve just discovered
the skull of an ape man in Rhodesia, Bill! I’d give a good deal to
be able to show them a Cretaceous man found in America.”

Bill leaned back with a sigh of repletion and lighted his second
cigarette. “Well, I dunno how Cretaceous they are, professor, but
they’re fossils all right enough. Stone, anyway, way back in a
cave--you have to crawl on your belly quite a ways, where I went in.
I guess maybe there’s another opening somewhere. I didn’t look for
it. I had pinon knots for torches, and I lit a fresh one soon as I
come into this chamber--or cave. And when the blaze showed them
stone skeletons-- Say, professor, I backed right out the same way
I’d went in!”

“How do you know they were fossilized? They may have been modern--no
more than a hundred years old! They may even have been frontiersmen
trapped in there while trying to escape from hostile Indians.”
Abington’s tone was crisp.

“I went back,” Bill declared calmly. “Got over my scare and wanted
to see for sure whether them skeletons was twelve feet high like
they looked to be, or just plain man size. So I looked good, next
time in. There was four, and the biggest wasn’t over eight feet. And
they was solid stone, far as I could tell.”

“I don’t suppose you could describe the geologic conditions--I shall
have to determine that, of course, when I arrive at the spot.”

During five minutes Bill smoked and silently eyed the archaeologist,
who sat meditatively tapping another burned stick into coals.

“One thing I better tell you, professor,” he ventured at last,
vaguely stirred by the rapt look in Abington’s dark eyes. “There’s a
lot more to it than just arriving ‘at the spot,’ as you say. When I
went into that cave, I was scared in. There’s something up in there
that got my goat. I beat it outa there--that’s how I got nabbed by
the law.

“I can’t tell you what it is, professor. Some kinda animal. Makes
tracks like a mountain sheep--but it ain’t a sheep; or if it is--
All I can say is that us Adam chasers will have to keep our eyes
peeled.”




CHAPTER IV--THE FOOTPRINT CLEW


Abington stood absolutely motionless with his head drooped forward,
his narrowed eyes surveying with brief, darting glances his
devastated camp. The small brown tent, lying in a tattered heap with
slits crisscrossing one another in the balloon silk which was so
light to carry--and so costly--received a second scrutiny. The camp
supplies, which had been neatly piled just where he had unloaded
them from the two burros that carried his own outfit, were strewn
about in indescribable disorder, as if a drove of hogs had held
carnival there for an hour or so.

Because of the view it gave of the fantastic, red-sandstone crags
across the valley, Abington had pitched his camp on a smooth hard
ledge a few feet above the level with a cliff at his back and a
spring of good water hidden away in a tiny cleft in the cañon at his
right. It was a cool, sightly spot, free from bothersome ant hills
or weedy growth that might harbor rattlesnakes or other venomous
creatures.

True to his word, Bill Jonathan camped apart from Abington. In this
particular location he had chosen a cave half a mile up the
cañon--and he had immediately set about walling up the entrance so
that he must squeeze in between two rocks which he could move across
the aperture at night.

“Getting close to the range of that gosh-awful thing, professor,” he
had explained. “Better hunt a hole yourself and crawl into
it--’specially at night. And you want to keep your eyes peeled, and
don’t go prowlin’ around without your gun or a knife or something.”

Abington liked his little brown-silk tent, however, and he was not
particularly impressed by the gosh-awfulness of the thing which Bill
Jonathan could not even describe--he having failed to catch so much
as a glimpse of it, as he had been forced to admit under Abington’s
repeated questioning.

Here was the ruin left by some animal, however, and Abington found
himself completely at a loss as he circled the camp, going slowly
and studying the wreckage foot by foot. On the ledge itself he did
not expect to see any tracks. He walked therefore to the edge of the
hard-pan and examined the softer gravel at the foot of the two-foot
slope.

There, cleanly outlined in a finer streak of red gravelly sand, he
discovered the imprint of a pointed, cloven foot; a gigantic sheep,
by the track, or possibly an elk, though elk were not known in that
country.

For some minutes he stood there looking for other tracks. When he
found one, he whistled under his breath. From the length of the
stride indicated by that second hoofprint he judged that this
particular animal must be considerably larger than a caribou.
“Gosh-awful” it certainly must be!

Abington stared down the wash, for a moment tempted to follow the
tracks. But with night coming on and an empty stomach clamoring to
be filled, he hesitated. There was the wrecked camp to set to rights
and such supplies as had not been destroyed must be gathered
together and placed where this malicious-minded animal could not
reach them again.

Moreover, the tracks might not be fresh, for the damage could have
been done at any time during the afternoon while he and Bill were
exploring a complex assortment of crooked ravines, tangled at the
head of the larger one where Bill had prepared to hole up in gloomy
security.

Abington was thoughtfully regarding a sack of flour that had been
slashed lengthwise and dragged in wanton destructiveness half across
the ledge, when Bill Jonathan’s voice sounded behind him, swearing a
dismayed oath.

“Looks like it’s been here a’ready!” Bill gasped, when Abington
turned and glanced at him.

“Looks as though something has been here,” Abington agreed. “Very
unusual incident, in some of the details. Certain incongruities can
scarcely be accounted for until I have further investigated the
matter. I have had a herd of wild elephants stampede through camp,
and I know the work of every marauding animal from jungle tigers to
the wolverines of Canada. But I have never seen anything quite like
this.

“For instance,” he went on, “the slits in that tent plainly started
from the peak and extended downward, with an upward thrust near the
bottom, leaving a triangular rent. Any horned animal that could rip
a tent like that invariably lowers the head and gores with an upward
toss. So does a hog. Certain indications would seem to point to a
wild hog--or a drove of them!--but I believe the longest slits in
the tent were accomplished while it was still standing.

“You will observe,” he continued, “that the rents are spaced with a
regularity impossible to attain while the material lay bundled in a
heap on the ground. The cloth has not been chewed, therefore it
could not be the work of wild cattle. Moreover, that sack of salt
was not touched. Wouldn’t you suppose, Bill, that any herbivorous
animal would smell the salt and go after it first?”

“Yeah, but it don’t ever touch salt, professor. Not as far as I
know. Did it leave any tracks?”

“Down here in the sand are some enormous hoofprints resembling sheep
or elk tracks, Bill. From its stride the beast must be as large as a
camel.”

“Yeah, and I’ve known it to leave mule tracks behind it!” Bill
declared glumly. “Now, maybe you’ll want to crawl into my cave,
professor!”

“I may decide to let you store what supplies are left, but I myself
don’t fancy caves except for research work. By the way, did you
notice any eoliths in that cave of yours, Bill?”

“I dunno. Killed a scorpion about four inches long and his tail
curled up. You ain’t afraid of bugs, are you, professor?”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Abington gave him a sharp glance, but Bill was innocent and looked
it.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Abington said, “since I shall probably
spend a week or more exploring these ravines. There should be a good
many artifacts left in the caves hereabouts. The carvings indicate
that the ancient people lived here and I have an idea that their
occupancy of this section of the country extended over considerable
period of time. This old Cretaceous sandstone gives every--”

“Yeah, and it’ll give ’em just the same to-morrow, don’t you think,
professor? I’m going to take what’s left of the flour and cache it
away in my cave, and that can of coffee. Looks to me like the thing
was scared off before it finished the job. All the times I’ve saw it
get in its work before now, it sure was thorough! You must ’ave
scared it--”

“In that case I may be able to catch it.”

Abington turned and strode again to where the tracks lay printed
deep in the packed sand. He stepped down off the ledge and followed
the hoofprints, scanning each one sharply as he came to it.

“Hey! You can’t trail that thing, professor!” Bill called anxiously.
“I tried that--once when it was a sheep and another time when it was
a mule. Tracks take to the hills and quit.

“Aw, gwan and find out for yourself, then!” he grumbled, when
Abington merely flung up his hand to show he heard and continued
along the wash. “Won’t be satisfied to take my word--never seen such
a bullheaded cuss. But it won’t be long, old boy, till you’ll be
tickled to death if you’re able to dodge it!”

Dusk deepened. Bill hurriedly salvaged what supplies were not
utterly destroyed, looking frequently over his shoulder when his
work would not permit him to keep his back toward the cliff. It
seemed a long while before Abington returned.

Bill’s uneasiness had reached the point where he threw back his head
to send a loud halloo booming out into the darkness; but at that
very moment Abington came stumbling up to the ledge, leaning heavily
on a dead mescal stalk while one foot dragged. Bill leaped forward
and pulled him up the slope.

“Rock rolled down the hill and started a slide,” Abington explained
in a flat, tired tone. “Dodged most of the rubble, but one fragment
struck against my ankle. Temporarily paralyzed my foot. Be all right
in a short time, Bill.” He sat down, breathing rather heavily.

“Who done it?” Bill knelt and tentatively felt the injured foot.

“No one, so far as I know. I am not sure, of course, but my
impression is that the slide was purely accidental.”

“See anything of your sheep?”

“Too dark to detect any signs after it took to the rocks. Heard
something--up the hill. Couldn’t exactly locate the sound. Any
coffee, Bill?”

Bill had been itching to get back to his cave and make coffee there,
but now he looked at Abington and hesitated. Neither Abington nor
any other man could laugh at Bill and call him a coward. There had
been a small pile of firewood; it was scattered around somewhere
among the débris. The coffeepot, he knew, had been flattened as if
an elephant had stepped on it; but he could find a can that would
serve.

                   *       *       *       *       *

He groped for the wood, found it and got a fire started. A cheerful
light pushed back the shadows, making them eerier than when all was
gloom. He set about supper of a sort, keeping his back to the ledge
with a persistence that might have amused Abington if he had not
been wholly occupied with the mystery that had impinged upon an
otherwise uneventful trip.

“I can’t fathom it,” he said at last, speaking half to himself. “It
is not a mountain sheep, I’m certain of that. Those slits in the
tent and the salt sack ignored--those two details alone place the
depredations apart from the work of any such animal.”

“Yeah, there ain’t no such animal!” Bill looked up to remark. “Now
you know why I wanted a gun, professor. You thought it was for
killing sheriffs, maybe, but you was wrong there. I told you there
was something up here we’d have to look out for. I asked you to get
me a gun, because I ain’t got much hopes of killin’ this thing by
throwin’ rocks at it. That’s why.”

“I’m sorry, Bill, but I really couldn’t buy you a gun,” Abington
told him gravely. “And I don’t think you will need one. The beast
keeps himself out of sight, it seems. It isn’t likely to attack
either of us.”

“Well, I’d about as soon be attacked as scared to death,” Bill
demurred. “That’s just it, professor. I wouldn’t give a cuss if I
could look the thing over, once. What I hate is coming in and
finding camp demolished and the grub all throwed out and nothing you
can fight back at. Well, here’s your coffee. It’s about all I could
find to cook, in the dark.”

They drank the coffee in silence, even the self-contained Abington
pausing every minute or so to stare into the darkness, listening. It
was a nerve-trying pastime which netted them nothing in the way of
enlightenment.

What it cost Bill to shoulder a load of more-or-less damaged
supplies and go off alone up the cañon, his way lighted only by the
stars, Abington could only guess. In justice to the peace officers
of the county he could not give the man a gun, and he sensed that
Bill was really afraid of the unknown marauder, and with good
reason, Abington was forced to admit.

Bill had been hunted from camp to camp by the thing which he had
never seen. He had been robbed and his food supplies destroyed until
at last he had fled the place only to fall into the hands of the
watchful sheriff. Abington couldn’t blame Bill for his fears. All
the same, Abington did not want to place a gun in the hands of an
escaped prisoner. That, it seemed to him, would be going rather
strong, even in the interests of science.

He was sitting with his back against the cliff with the dying fire
before him, rubbing his numbed ankle to which sensation was
returning with sharp stabs of pain, when Bill came up out of the
cañon mouth with his bundle still on his shoulders and his eyes
staring.

“It’s been to the cave,” he announced in a suppressed tone. “Clawed
out the rocks I walled the opening up with and raised hell with my
stuff. Professor, how bad do you want them stone Adamses?”




CHAPTER V--GALLOPING BURROS


Across the valley the moon peered over a jagged pinnacle, looking as
if broken teeth had bitten deep into its lower rim. That effect was
soon brushed away as the pale disk swung higher, and the blood-red
sandstone peaks stood fantastically revealed in the swimming
radiance. The valley straightway became enchanted ground wherein
fairy folk might dance on the smooth sand strips or play laughing
games of hide and seek among the strange pillars and jutting crags.

Beside the dying fire Bill Jonathan dozed, head bent with now and
then an involuntary drop forward, whereupon he would rouse and
glance sharply to left and right--the habit of a man who knows
himself hunted, a man whose safety lies in unsleeping vigilance.

“Lie down on the tent, Bill,” Abington advised him, after his third
startled awakening. “Lie down and make yourself comfortable.
To-morrow you can watch while I sleep.”

“Aw, I can keep awake, professor. All that climbing around to-day
made me kinda tired, is all. If I know you’re asleep, I’ll keep my
eyes open wide enough.”

“But I don’t want to sleep, Bill. This little mystery must be solved
before we go any farther with our chief business. Couldn’t sleep if
I wanted to.”

“You’ll stay awake a darn long while, professor, if you wait to put
salt on the tail of the thing that haunts this valley,” Bill opined.

Abington calmly knocked the dottle from his pipe and began to refill
it, ready for another long, meditative smoke. “For every problem in
the universe there is a correct answer,” he said quietly. “It is
only our ignorance that makes mysteries of things simple enough in
themselves. A peculiar arrangement of details has given this
‘gosh-awful’ animal of yours an air of mystery, but the explanation
is simple enough, I’ll guarantee.”

“Yeah, but how are you going to find this explanation--that you
think is so darned simple?” Bill stifled a yawn.

“Just as I find the meaning of the hieroglyphics; by studying the
symbols already familiar to me, and from them arriving at the
natural relation of the unknown characters. This thing left tracks,
and it managed to accomplish a certain amount of destruction in a
given time. To-morrow morning I’ll take a look at your cave, and the
answer to the puzzle will not be so hard to find as you imagine.”

Bill mumbled a half-finished sentence and lay down on the torn tent,
and presently the rhythmic sound of snoring hushed the strident
chorus of stone crickets on the ledge.

Until the moon had swum its purple sea and reached shore on the
western rim of the valley, Abington lounged beside the cliff, so
quiet that any observer might have thought him asleep. For a time
his pipe sent up a thin column of aromatic smoke, then went cold;
and after that only the moonlight shining on his wide-open eyes
betrayed the fact that Abington was very much awake.

An owl hooted monotonously in the cañon at his right, probably near
the spring. A coyote yammered on the steep hillside across the cañon
mouth, and a little later Abington heard the frightened, squealing
cry of a rabbit caught unawares by that coyote or another.

On a cliff just over his head, shadowed now as the moon slipped
behind the hill, the ancient people he was tracing had carved
intricate tribal records. These had endured far beyond the last
vague legend of those whose valor had thus been blazoned before
their little world, a world that had seemed so vast and
imperishable, no doubt, to heroes and historians alike.

It seemed to him that here was a land well fitted to hold the full
story of these forgotten lives. Could he but find it, and read it
aright, might not his own name be blazoned before his own people--to
be forgotten perchance in ages to come, as these were forgotten now?

                   *       *       *       *       *

The cave that held fast the bones of these ancients lay somewhere in
the bewildering maze of cañons across the valley. Bill Jonathan
would recognize the spot, so he had declared whenever Abington
questioned him. A certain rock on the cañon’s northern rim, shaped
like the head of a huge rhinoceros with two tusks on his snout--Bill
was positive he could not miss it, once he got inside the cañon. The
opening to the cave was directly under the first tusklike rock
spire. A matter of ten miles perhaps, Bill had guessed as he stood
on the ledge and gazed across.

Here on this side were caves and even with the hope of finding the
fossil skeletons Bill had described, Abington had wanted to explore
these before going on. He still wanted to do so, if he and Bill
could manage to hunt down the unknown pillager of camps, or at least
guard their supplies against further depredations. If the raid on
Bill’s cave had been as complete as on his own camp, he would be
compelled to postpone all research work while he plodded with the
burros to the nearest town for fresh supplies. Bill could not go,
that was certain.

At daybreak Abington was planning drowsily to send Bill up the cañon
after the burros, load on what was left of the outfit and cross
immediately to the other side of the valley, where they would
endeavor to find the skeletons first of all and be sure of them
before he went out for supplies. He would then be able to take out
specimens to send on to his museum, thus saving a bothersome trip
later on.

His hand reached out to shake Bill’s leg and rouse him to the day’s
work, when a great clattering sounded in the cañon mouth near by.
Bill needed no shaking to bring him to his feet. As the two
automatically faced toward the noise, there came the three burros in
a panicky gallop out of the cañon and into the open.

In one great leap Bill left the ledge and ran yelling and flailing
his arms to head them off before they stampeded down the valley. The
leading burro, a staid, mouse-colored little beast, swerved from
him, wheeled toward the hills opposite, stumbled and fell in a heap.
The second kept straight on down the valley, the third burro at its
heels. Bill let them go while he ran to the fallen leader.

Though it took but a minute to cover the short distance, the burro’s
eyes were already glazing when Bill arrived. As he stopped and bent
over it a shuddering convulsion seized its legs and immediately it
stiffened. It was dead.

Bill stood dumfounded, eying it stupidly for a moment before he
turned to call Abington. But the shout died in his throat, for his
glance had fallen upon a fresh disaster. The two other burros were
down and kicking convulsively, just as the first had done. They were
dead before he could reach them.

Abington was not in sight when Bill, walking heavily under the
burden of this new tragedy, returned to the ledge; but presently he
came limping out of the cañon and into camp.

“I thought I could discover what had stampeded the burros,” Abington
said, coming up with an indefinable air of surprise that Bill should
be standing there passive with that blank look on his face. “Too
late, again. If it was the gosh-awful, he’d disappeared before I
could get up there. Did you head off the burros? I want to move camp
this morning.”

“Yeah--but you’ll have to git along without ’em this morning. The
damn things is dead.”

Abington looked at him, looked past him to where Bill pointed an
unsteady finger. He got off the ledge and limped over to the nearest
carcass, looked it over carefully, walked to the others and examined
them, and returned thoughtfully to camp.

Bill had kindled a fire and was starting off to the spring with an
empty bucket when Abington stopped him.

“Hey, come back here! Don’t use any water from that spring.”

“Yeah? Where will I use water from, then?”

“From a canteen. I filled two yesterday. The burros were at the
spring this morning and stampeded from there. I can’t be certain
yet, of course, but I think the water is poisoned.”

Bill stared, his jaw sagging. Abington was looking out across the
valley, his eyes narrowed and blacker than Bill had ever seen them.

“I may be wrong, Bill, but we can’t afford to take a chance. One
burro might suddenly pass out with heart failure, but when three of
them turn up their toes in the same way and at the same moment, the
coincidence will bear investigation, I think!”

“How could that sheep thing poison a spring?” Bill’s tone implied
violent incredulity.

“I don’t know. I’m merely stating what appears to be a fact. Three
burros drank at that spring and afterward stampeded out of the cañon
and dropped dead in the open. I’m assuming that the water in the
spring, or at least in the little pool below it, was poisoned. They
must have been scared away, else they would have died right there
near the spring. Yes, I think it will bear investigation!”

“Yeah, but in the meantime we’ve got to have water,” Bill said
gloomily, shaking a canteen gently before he poured a little into
his makeshift coffeepot. “I don’t aim to stick around till my tongue
swells up, doing fancy thinkin’ about a poisoned spring. Suit
yourself, professor, but I’m going to hunt water, soon as we go
through the motions of eating.”

“I suppose in time the spring will clear itself and run pure,”
Abington reassured him with a twitching of his bearded lips. “If we
were to stay here, we could divert the trickle from the rocks and
soon have another pool. But we could never be sure that it was not
poisoned again. No, Bill, we’ll have to get our belongings together
and move across the valley.”

“A darn hard job,” muttered Bill, “packing everything on our backs.”
And he added: “That sheep thing can travel, too; don’t overlook that
fact, professor.”




CHAPTER VI--READY FOR A BLOW


The eastern rim of the valley stood crimson where the westering sun
struck it full, bringing into bold relief each cañon and crag, the
smallest fold and the smoothest boulder; as if a contour map had
been painstakingly modeled on a gigantic scale in red sealing wax,
or as if a world aflame had been paralyzed into utter silence.

Toward that garish pile of shattered hills, Abington and Bill
Jonathan plodded with the low sun at their backs, which were
burdened heavily with as much of their camp supplies as they had
been able to retrieve and could carry.

The start that morning had been delayed until nearly noon while they
searched vainly for some clew to the mystery that had in a few hours
held an orgy of wanton destructiveness in two camps and had poisoned
their water supply and killed three burros. Human malevolence had
been displayed in that last attack, Abington was convinced.

Yet in spite of all his skill, all the careful attention to details
which his scientific training had made second nature, he had failed
to discover the slightest evidence of a human agency at work against
them. Not a sign, not a track, save those enormous sheep tracks
leaving the vicinity of the spring and going off up a narrow ravine
in great strides which made it hopeless to think of overtaking it;
for without water he did not dare attempt any prolonged search. Now,
with a half mile of red sand to plow through before they reached the
first bold hillside, their eyes clung perforce to the seamed, broken
rampart they were nearing.

A dazzling light that flashed and was gone, then came again and
stood motionless for a space while one might count fifteen, showed
high up on a ridge as evenly serrated as a rooster’s comb, and quite
as red. Abington came to a full stop which he made a rest period by
slipping the heavy pack from his shoulders. Nothing loath, Bill did
likewise. The two sat down on the sand beside their bundles, mopping
perspiration from faces and necks.

“Bill, when I get up and stand in front of you, look past me at the
sharp peak just south of the mountain--the first one on the ridge
straight before us. Tell me if you see anything that might be a
reflection of the sun--from a telescope, we’ll say, or more likely a
pair of field glasses. No, don’t look yet. Remember that with good
glasses a man could read the expression on your face, read your
lips, too, if he’s had any training.”

At the first sentence Bill’s face had hardened. “You don’t have to
preach caution to a man that’s been on the dodge long as I have,” he
muttered bitterly, under cover of lighting a cigarette. “Shoot. What
d’you think--that it’s an officer, maybe?”

“I’m not thinking past the field glasses that I believe are focused
on us,” Abington parried, rising and standing so that his back was
to the ridge while he held up his watch before Bill’s face. “He may
think I’m trying to hypnotize you, but it’s an excuse. Look right
past this watch, to a point between the second and third little
pinnacles on the ridge. See anything?”

“Something moved, in the notch just below that pinnacle. I got it
against the sky for a minute. There ain’t any shine, though. Might
have been a sheep.”

Abington put away his watch, stooped and shouldered his pack.

Bill slipped his arms through the rope loops and wriggled his own
burden into place on his back as he got up. “Wouldn’t think they’d
be lookin’ for me away down here,” he said uneasily, after a few
rods of silent plodding. “Not unless you--” He sent an involuntary
glance toward his companion.

“Unless I informed on you when I went after supplies, and arranged
for your capture after I had benefited by your information,”
Abington answered the look. “You don’t really think that, Bill.”

“I don’t know why I wouldn’t think it, if somebody’s planted up
there watching for us with glasses,” Bill retorted, not more than
half in earnest but yielding to the ugly mood born of nerve strain
and muscle weariness.

“Of course, you can think any idiotic thing you choose,” Abington
returned, in that tolerant tone which he could summon when he wished
to bite into a man’s self-esteem. “Any other brilliant ideas on the
subject, explaining why, if I were contemplating treachery, I should
call your attention to that light on the ridge up there?”

“Yeah, I might have one or two,” Bill growled. “I was a fool to
start across here in broad daylight. Now, if they come after me, I
ain’t even got a gun!”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Abington sent a quick, sidelong glance toward Bill’s face. That gun
question was becoming a touchy subject between them. “No, you
haven’t a gun. So you are not quite so liable to a few extra
years--or a chair in the gas house--if you are caught!”

“Well, I ain’t caught yet!” Bill’s upper lip lifted away from his
teeth. “Not by a damn sight!”

Abington gave him another sidelong glance. The snarl was not lost
upon him, though he made no reply. Like many another man who is
agreeable enough in ordinary circumstances, Bill Jonathan’s good
nature did not always stand up under hardship.

That blustery impatience at the physical discomforts of a long
grilling walk was beginning to crop out in Bill, mostly in the form
of a surly ill temper and a grumbling against conditions which
neither could help. Abington had reached the point of gauging the
exact degree of surliness and to set up mental defenses against his
moods.

Bill had taken the initiative in this quest and he was surely
receiving full value for his efforts. From a sporting admiration for
Bill’s daring, and a certain liking for his whimsical shrewdness,
Abington was consciously beginning to chafe at the man’s crabbed
temper; he felt a growing distrust, too, which was yet formless and
only vaguely realized.

He caught himself wishing now that he had asked Park what crime
stood against Bill Jonathan. No use asking Bill; he would say what
he pleased and the other could believe it or not.

“If you’ve got any wild idea of finding out from me where them stone
skeletons is, and then turning me over to the sheriff, you better
revise the notion, professor,” Bill said abruptly, having brooded
over it for five minutes. “I’m nobody’s fool.”

“Then why talk like one?” Exhaustion was beginning to draw a white
line beside Abington’s nostrils and his bruised ankle ached cruelly.
He began to feel that he’d had enough of Bill’s grousing. “You’ve
nothing to kick about, so shut up. I’m doing packer’s work rather
than have men along who might go out and betray you.”

“Yeah. You knew mighty well I wouldn’t stir a foot if you brought in
a bunch of mouthy roughnecks,” Bill growled back. “How do I know
what you framed in town?”

Abington slipped his pack off his shoulders and swung toward Bill
with a menacing glitter in his eyes. “That’s going a bit strong,
even for you,” he said sharply. “If you’ve any reason for saying
that, out with it! If not, I’ll thank you to keep such thoughts
behind your teeth. You’re getting quite as much as you are giving,
Bill Jonathan--and by that I mean to include loyalty and fair play.

“For all I know,” Abington went on, “you invented the story of
fossilized human remains as a temptation that would insure my
protection and the food you’d need in case you made your escape from
Park. Do you suppose I was so blind I did not see that possibility
from the start? A fossilized man, as you knew, was bait I’d be
pretty sure to swallow. Well, I did swallow it--but not with my eyes
shut, I assure you. Please give me credit for that much
intelligence.

“I took you at your word,” he continued, “and I have played the game
straight. I shall continue to play it square, until I find that you
have lied to me.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

He waited, balanced, ready for the blow he expected. Instead, he saw
the expression in Bill’s eyes change to a grudging mollification, as
if the very abusiveness of the attack reassured him.

“I never said anything to put you on your ear,” Bill hedged
morosely, after an uncomfortable pause. “What are you razzing me
for? I said I wouldn’t be caught and I won’t be. That goes,
professor.”

“Very well, let’s have no more talk about it.” Abington lifted his
pack to his galled shoulders and started on, leaving Bill to his own
devices; wherefore Bill presently overtook him and walked alongside.

The truce held while the clouds flamed with the sunset, a barbaric
pageant that could not rival the sanguine magnificence of that wild
ensemble of towering hills slashed with deep gorges whose openings
were frequently hidden away behind bold, jutting pinnacles.

“Looks like the devil was practicing on these hills, trying to make
a world of his own with nothing but fire for building material,”
Bill observed at last, wanting to appear friendly and awed in spite
of himself before the spectacle. “When God came along and told him
to knock off, looks like the devil just kicked it all to thunder and
dragged his feet through the mess a few times and walked off and
left it like that. Don’t you think so, professor?”

“I’ve heard theories advanced that were not half so plausible,”
Abington replied, his voice once more calm and slightly ironic, as
if he still doubted Bill’s sincerity. “A man could spend a lifetime
in this country without exhausting its archaeological
possibilities.”

“Yeah--or without getting caught,” Bill added, speaking as had the
other of the thing nearest his own heart.




CHAPTER VII--INTO THE BLACKNESS


Bill and Abington came to and entered a narrow, straight-walled
gorge. It had a loose, sandy bottom and every indication that ages
before it had been a watercourse with the floods of glacial rainfall
sluicing down to the valley. Presently Bill, plowing laboriously
ahead to a certain spring he remembered in a cave up this ravine,
gave a grunt and stopped short.

In the peculiar, amethystine veil of the afterglow which lay upon
the hills like a cunning stage effect of, colored lights, he pointed
a finger stiffly to a certain mark in the sand. Abington limped
forward and joined him.

“I see the gosh-awful is here ahead of us,” he said listlessly.
“Well, it will be obliged to wreck us personally this time, Bill,
since all our worldly goods are literally on our backs. We may get a
sight of it at last.”

“That all you care?” Bill stared at him. “Maybe I’d feel that way
about it, too, if I had a gun to defend myself with. You’re making a
big mistake, professor. You’ll see it before you’re through.”

“Possibly.” Abington’s tone was skeptical. “How far is it to the
spring?”

Bill did not reply. He was still staring at the strange tracks that
were too large for any sheep one could imagine, yet not shaped like
cattle tracks, nor much resembling the elk they had discussed last
night. Blurred though they were in the fine sand, they were yet
easily distinguishable to being the same hoof prints they had seen
across the valley.

The tracks did not look very fresh, and after a brief study of them
Abington took the lead, perhaps because he was armed and Bill was
not.

Presently Abington stopped and pointed to a cleft in the rocks.
“Whatever it is, it turned out of the gorge and went up there,” he
said. “Pretty good climbing, even for a sheep.”

“I’ll go ahead and show you the spring,” Bill volunteered and
Abington chuckled to himself.

Bill looked back at him with sullen eyes. “All right for you,
professor--with two guns handy,” he said resentfully. “Put you in
here with just your bare hands and maybe you wouldn’t be so damn
nervy, yourself.”

“I’d probably wait until I saw some danger before I became alarmed.”

Bill muttered something under his breath, and stepped out more
briskly. Both were thirsty, but since they had left the western side
of the valley with one canteen nearly full, the need of water had
not yet become acute. It was the tramp across the valley with packs
too heavy for them that had told on the tempers of the two men--with
Abington’s bruised foot and Bill’s nervous dread of pursuit for good
measure.

The spring proved to be well protected, in a water-worn cave that
seemed to offer excellent shelter. A tangle of nondescript oak
bushes grew near the entrance and drew moisture from the overflow
which, though slight, was yet sufficient for the scant vegetation.

The cave itself was not large, with a fine sandy floor and a lofty
arched roof of irregular blocks of the red sandstone which was the
regular formation of these hills. A lime dyke broke through here and
there in sharp peaks and ridges in a fairly continuous outcropping
roughly pointing toward the river.

Abington slipped off his pack, drank from the spring and sat down
against the wall of the cave to unlace his boot from his lame foot.

Bill began gathering dry twigs and branches and set about making
coffee and frying a little bacon. “We oughta git a sheep or
something,” he grumbled, breaking a long moody silence. “This time
of year there’s generally sheep running in through here.”

“I’ll take a hunt, when my foot has had a rest. We can manage for a
day or two,” Abington replied without looking up.

“Say, you’d be in a hell of a fix if you broke your leg,” Bill
sneered. “You’d starve to death before you’d trust me with a gun,
wouldn’t you?”

“There’s meat for to-night. To-morrow will take care of itself.”

“Yeah, maybe it will--and it’ll leave us to do the same,” Bill
retorted. “What the heck are you scared of, professor?”

“Nothing at all. Not even your gosh-awful. Will you fill that corn
can with water for me, Bill? I’ll try a cold compress on the foot.”

Bill did as he was requested and a sight of the discolored foot
stirred him to sympathy. Abington, he suddenly saw, must have
suffered cruelly all day, though he hadn’t said anything about it.
Bill remembered too that Abington had remained awake all last night
while he himself had slept. But it was not Bill’s way to apologize.

“That’s a hell of a looking foot!” he growled. “Hot water beats
cold. After supper I’ll heat a can of water--”

“After supper I’m going to sleep,” Abington rebuffed him. “Cold
water will do.”

“Have it your way--it’s your foot,” snapped Bill, and relapsed into
his morose silence.

                   *       *       *       *       *

It was not an agreeable supper, and neither spoke while they drank
coffee and ate bacon and fried corn from the same frying pan.

Bill was tired and full of uneasy fears and he bitterly resented
Abington’s action in regard to the guns. He was accustomed to the
feel of a gun’s weight against his hip and the thought of facing
trouble without a weapon gave him an uncomfortable feeling of
helplessness. Add mystery to the hazard, and Bill reacted with a
dread not far removed from panic.

Abington ate and drank his share, then forced himself to explore the
cave with a lamp. He chose for himself a niche in one side of the
wall near the entrance, where he would hear any intruder and would
still be fairly well concealed.

At least, that was his idea when he settled himself in the recess.
As a matter of fact not even his aching foot could keep him awake.
He dropped almost at once into the deep dreamless sleep of
exhaustion. When he opened his eyes it was to see the sunlight
slanting into the cave--a circumstance which at first convinced him
that it must be nearly noon, since the cave opening faced the south
and the cañon walls were high.

After a brief space of mental fogginess, however, his mind snapped
into alertness. He remembered that he had stooped to enter the
cavern; the sunlight bathed the high-arched roof just over his head
and brought into relief certain symbols--left there by the ancients,
he had no doubt.

For a time he lay looking up at the roof, deciphering each crude
character, his eyes tracing the lines which even in that sheltered
place showed the erosion of many centuries. Some of the lines were
dimmed; none retained the sharp outlines left by the engravers.

Now he knew that the cave had a high opening through which the sun
was shining; a common occurrence in that old formation that had
suffered the buffetings of wind and water for millions of years, and
moreover had been rocked and twisted by many a primeval earthquake.
He thought no more of the opening, but insensibly slipped under the
spell of those ancient records, his imagination thrilling to each
new sign as it caught his eye.

The story of a journey was depicted there, a journey of death, he
judged from certain priestly emblems and the sign of burial. Perhaps
they had attempted to depict the journey of the soul, though he
could only guess at that, his speculations revolving around a figure
of a dog or wolf, very similar to the jackal which in the belief of
ancient Egypt was supposed to carry souls across the desert to
paradise. He wondered, searching farther along the roof for further
inscriptions.

Like an old rangeman riding up to a herd of strange cattle,
unconsciously reading the brands and mentally identifying the
owners, Abington could not seem to pull his mind away from that
roof. Beyond the sunlit patch the carvings extended into obscurity
so deep that, stare as he would, he could not distinguish the lines.

A sense of bafflement nagged at him. Just as the cattleman will
follow a range animal for half a mile, seeking the vague
satisfaction of seeing what brand had been burned into its hide,
Abington sat up and put on his boots, and picked up the can of
carbide and miner’s lamp which he used in preference to candles when
exploring dark caverns. He started climbing up a tilted shelf of
rock that offered a precarious footing for a man tall enough to
bridge certain places where the shelf had dropped completely away
and left gaps in what may once have been a steep narrow trail.

From the floor of the cave it looked impossible for anything save a
fly or a lizard to climb to the roof. When he started, Abington had
not expected to do more than reach a point from where he could view
the shadowed writing at closer range. He kept going, however, while
the lame foot protested with twinges of pain that gradually ceased
as the muscles limbered. Presently he stood on a low irregular
balcony, the writings just over his head.

This was something he had not suspected even while lying on his back
studying the roof. He made his way along the ledge, forced to stoop
so that he was soon walking like a gorilla with his hands sometimes
touching the balcony floor. He became suddenly aware of an odd
variation in the rough sandstone. The sharp, granular formation was
worn down to a dull smoothness in the center of the ledge where he
walked. It was a pathway polished by many shuffling feet--nothing
else.

He turned a corner and peered into blackness; an ancient water
channel was there, no doubt. Abington lighted a match, saw that the
hieroglyphics continued along the wall. Waiting only long enough to
light the carbide lamp, he set off along the narrow passage, pausing
now and then to study the inscriptions as he went.

Broad chambers receded into blackness beyond the white light of his
lamp and these he hastily explored before going on. Labyrinthine
passageways were revealed as he turned the light this way and that,
each opening inscribed with strange symbols carved in the rock at
the sides.

“A gold mine of records!” Abington exclaimed to himself in the
whisper that was his habit when alone. “The ancient people who lived
here seem to have had a Scribblers’ Club of very active members! An
ancient catacomb, or I’m mistaken. That, or else these symbols were
carved with the express purpose of misleading one. H’m! An attempt
to confuse the devil and thwart him in his search for the souls of
the dead! Now here’s a pretty problem for an archaeologist. Let’s
see if I am smarter than the devil!”




CHAPTER VIII--THE GREAT CHAIN OF EVIL


Ordinarily John Abington thought fairly well of himself and he felt
certain that these misleading characters could not prevent him from
finding the way to the actual burial place. For one thing, he
discovered that many of the passages--a miner would have called them
drifts--had been hacked out by hand, with stone hammers and wedges.
How long and arduous a task that had been, he could only conjecture.

In several of the drifts he found implements to prove his theory.
After a glance or two that identified them with the early people he
had been tracing, he went on and left the implements lying there for
the present, knowing that he could return at any time and get them
if he wished to do so.

It cost him several fruitless trips down long, winding ways that
finally ended in blank walls, before he learned to mistrust the
man-made passageways, which had evidently been cunningly constructed
to deceive the devil himself--and any other unwelcome intruder.

He began to study more carefully the carvings placed at the openings
of these zigzag passages, but after a while he was forced to admit
to himself that he could make nothing of them. So far as he could
determine with a cursory examination they all looked much alike,
though he knew there must be some secret differentiation. He could
only avoid such corridors as seemed to him the work of human hands,
and go on.

Going on was not a simple thing, however. Many times he was forced
to crawl on hands and knees along an old water channel with fine red
sand packed hard and smooth, and at such times he caught himself
looking for human footprints. That he found nothing of the kind in
any of the old water channels seemed to him a proof that the ancient
ones had traversed these black passages before the time of copious
rainfall, else the sand would not have been so smooth and untrodden.

Frequently he was forced to climb up through crevices where the
rocks were worn glossy--always, wherever rock lay underfoot, the
same smoothness prevailed --until it seemed to him that he must soon
emerge upon the crest of the high-turreted ridge which formed that
wall of the cañon.

After a time that to Abington had been timeless, so absorbed was he
in the fascinating quest of a final destination which these signs
seemed to promise, he was recalled to practical things by the
dimming of his carbide lamp. He held it close to his ear and shook
it, but heard no sloshing sound in the small water compartment above
the carbide.

                   *       *       *       *       *

He moved the tiny lever that permitted the water to leak drop by
drop over the lumps of carbide to form the acetylene gas which
burned with a clear white light until water or carbide--or
both--were exhausted and the gas ceased to form, but the flame still
burned feebly and threatened to go out altogether.

Abington glanced at his watch and gave a low whistle. No wonder the
lamp was going out! His watch said that the hour was eleven
thirty-five, though he would have sworn it was crazy if the lamp had
not begun to fail.

He must have been prowling in there for three or four hours. That
was as long as the lamp would burn with one filling of water. The
previous evening he had wanted to make sure of a steady light in
case they were disturbed during the night and he had put in fresh
carbide and filled the small tank with water just before going to
bed.

“Damned idiot! Brought the carbide can along, and no extra water!”
he anathematized his carelessness.

After all, he was not so culpable, however, for he had intended to
use the lamp for only a few minutes, to study the carvings on the
cave roof. The can of carbide, lying beside the lamp, had gone into
his pocket from force of habit, a good habit, too. If only he had
slipped the quart canteen over his shoulder! But Abington’s work had
taught him to manage comfortably with very little water and who
would burden himself with a canteen when he was merely going to
climb fifteen or twenty feet?

He shut off the lamp entirely, since it was folly to waste the flame
while he sat there thinking over the unpleasant predicament in which
his scientific zeal had led him. That little cat claw of light might
serve to help him over a bad place, he reflected. As he sat there,
he could recall several places which he would not care to negotiate
in the dark. Furthermore, there had been trickles of water in some
of the passages and one cavern held a pool.

It occurred to him that Bill would probably be worried. It was the
first time he had thought of Bill since he started this strange
underground journey. He remembered now that he had not seen Bill in
the cave when he left it that morning. “He’ll think the gosh-awful
got me in the night!” Abington grinned to himself.

Abington hated to go back without having discovered the secret of
these writings, but common sense told him that the thorough
exploration of this place was likely to take some little time. The
problem now was to find his way back to the cave. He had little
doubt that he could retrace his steps, though he realized that it
would take some time, feeling his way along in the dark, as he would
be compelled to do unless he found water.

He stood up, stooping under the low roof, and stared unseeingly into
the blackness whence he had come, trying to recall the nearest point
where he could find water. It was some little distance back, he
knew. He had been climbing considerably in the last half hour or
more and the walls were dry.

Well, he would have to help out with matches until he found water
enough to fill his lamp. An inveterate smoker, he had a fair supply
of matches; and now he lighted one and tucked it under the little
lamp switch, so that he could have the benefit of the blaze down the
full length of the wood.

That first match having helped him down a rough channel where the
boulders were trickily piled, he felt his way along the wall as far
as he dared go before lighting another. Walking in alternate
darkness and light, he made his way for some distance.

Inevitably the time arrived when he paused, hesitating between a
left-hand turn and a right, with a black hole directly in front of
him. It cost Abington two matches to decide that he knew none of
these passages, that he had not come this way at all.

He was about to retrace his steps to a point where he was sure of
the landmarks when, far away, he heard the faint drip, drip, drip of
water falling on rock. At first, standing there in black silence
save for the intermittent tinkling, he could not tell where the
sound came from.

By walking a few feet down each passage, however, he eliminated
first the left passage and then the right, and so went straight
ahead down a gentle incline with roof so high that a match flame
failed to reveal it, and so narrow that his shoulders brushed the
walls on either side as he walked. He judged it to be a natural
fissure running through the hill, an old watercourse; the ridge
seemed honeycombed with them.

That particular match having burned itself out, Abington walked on
in darkness, frankly relieved at the near prospect of water. He was
willing now to admit to himself that he was very thirsty, and that
the hunger gnawing at his stomach could be easier borne if he had a
drink.

It would be a relief, too, to have a decent light once more and he
promised himself grimly that this time he would not loiter along,
studying hieroglyphics as he went. They could wait until he came in
again prepared to explore the place thoroughly and chalk the
different turnings so there could be no blundering in the future.
So, thinking of future precautions, he stepped out over the lip of a
small precipice and fell headlong into water.

He came up spluttering sentences which might have surprised Bill,
who had found him always controlled in his speech. Abington fumbled
for the edge of the pool, found it and hung on with one hand while
he explored with the other for room to lift himself out on the rock.
Grimly he clung to the lamp, which was doubly vital to him now, and
when he had made shift to crawl out he turned and sat with his legs
dangling in water to his knees while he prepared to fill his lamp.

“Well, I wanted water,” he said with a chuckle, when his first
startled rage had passed and he was smoothing the water out of his
wet beard. “Sooner or later we do get what we want, I’ve noticed,
even though the manner of getting is often unexpected.” With the
lamp cap opened, he leaned and dipped the lamp in the water, feeling
for the depth.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Abington’s nerves were scarcely more susceptible to emotion than
wires, but the Stygian blackness and the silence broken only by that
tinkling drip, drip, drip, began to press rather heavily upon his
consciousness. In spite of himself his fingers shook and fumbled the
simple mechanism which provided for lighting the lamp with a spark
when matches were not available--as his emphatically were not, after
their involuntary bath.

He whirred the little wheel again and again before he succeeded in
striking a spark that would ignite the gas, and exhaled a long
breath of gratitude when the slender white flame suddenly sprang
into life. Solicitously he coaxed it into a brighter radiance and
turned its full beam upward, looking for the spot where he had
walked over the edge of the fissure. When he found it, his mouth
sagged open.

“Call this hole a teapot, and I’d say I fell down the spout,” he
grunted. “A pretty problem--getting out again!”

In truth the problem was not pretty, but instead was as ugly a
situation as any in which John Abington had ever found himself. The
place was not unlike a huge teapot with bulging sides and the
fissure for a spout. How deep the water was in the pool, he could
only guess; considerably over six feet, he knew, because he had
taken a dive of about fifteen feet and he did not remember that he
touched bottom at all. As to the diameter of the pool, that too was
a matter of conjecture, since the light did not show the farther
rim.

He leaned over, dropped a wet match into the water and watched it,
edging along the rim of the pool as the match floated gently away
from the side where he had fallen in.

Abington’s eyes brightened. “Thought there was a current,” he said
with a nod of confirmation. “Some outlet, of course. Some inlet, as
well. This pool never filled drop by drop.”

Carefully guarding his lamp, he worked his way along, following the
match. He saw it hesitate, poise and sway like something grown
suddenly fearful, then up-end and disappear under water as if
invisible fingers had reached up and seized it. Abington leaned far
over, flung another match into the water and saw it disappear as the
first had done.

He dropped his hand into the water, let the fingers dangle
passively, and felt the nagging pull of the undertow. The hope of
leaving the cavern by following the outlet of the pool died before
it had gained more than a flutter of life. For the water flowed out
by a subterranean channel which no man could follow.

Abington continued around the pool, turning the lamp this way and
that upon water and walls. The place was not unlike a huge cistern,
roughly round and slowly drying up, judging from certain marks on
the rock rim which in places sloped steeply toward the water.
Presently he discovered the inlet, a small stream running down
through a crack in the wall. There was no hope Whatever of getting
out that way. It was here that the tinkly drip fell into the pool
from a finger of rock thrust out of the fissure.

Even in his urgent need of finding his way back to the surface, his
scientific mind ruled Abington, for he caught himself turning the
lamp rays back for a second look at hieroglyphics carved high up.

“What the deuce!” he muttered. “That can mean nothing but evil--much
evil--and the death of many. Aztec and Egyptian--not burial but
death, and an evil death at that. Death to many--repeated over
there. Well, the carvers were here, that’s certain. Couldn’t have
come in as I came. H’m--”

He went on, stepping across the fissure where the water flowed in,
and keeping to the dank rim which widened as he proceeded. Although
the walls rose roughly perpendicular with here an outward bulge,
there a falling back to a steep incline, there was visible no
passage nor even a split, save where the water came sliding down the
fissure that was no more than a seam. All along the wall, high up
wherever a smooth surface offered, there were the carvings, with
little variation in their sinister portent, the great chain of evil,
and the death of many.




CHAPTER IX--A JUMP INTO SPACE


Twice Abington circled the pool, pausing often to scan the carvings
and to look up at the place where he had made his unexpected
entrance. A real jump-off, that; more than twice the height of a
tall man, and no possibility of climbing back unless one had a rope.
The water had undoubtedly saved him a nasty fall.

As a means of escape, Abington gave it up and turned his attention
to the places where the walls slanted up into blackness. He was
standing thoughtfully considering his next move--a matter that would
bear thought!--when he was startled by an explosive report, muffled
by distance, but nevertheless unmistakably a gunshot.

Something approaching a spasm of rage at his helplessness shook
Abington and passed, leaving him again calculating and outwardly
calm. The sound could not have come down the fissure from which he
had fallen. He had come too far along a straight passage before he
reached the three forks, for an outside noise to penetrate to him
there.

The sound might have come down the narrow inlet to the pool, but
Abington dismissed that possibility, probably because it was of no
use to him, since he could not very well worm his way through an
eight-inch crevice.

There must be some opening in the roof. If not, then one good
archaeologist was likely to be counted a martyr to science and
finally forgotten--his own bones eventually becoming mere fossilized
relics.

“Cheerful prospect, by Jove!” he grunted as he turned his back on
the inlet and began to examine the walls with the speculative eye of
a steeple jack. Now that he was fairly sure that the surface was
near, Abington did find a place where it looked possible for an
athlete to climb up, at least as far as the light illumined the
walls.

He was resolved that there must be no more carelessness. Before he
left the pool he took the precaution of emptying the carbide lumps
from the can into his handkerchief, and filling the can with water.
The tight-fitting top served to keep the water from leaking into his
pocket, though he stowed the carbide in another for safety’s sake.
He kept out but one lump, which he put into the lamp, leaving
himself in the dark for a minute or two.

With the lamp dry and warm the tiny flint wheel sparked at the first
attempt and the white tongue of flame shot out in a friendly fashion
that brought the ghost of a smile to Abington’s lips. Even then he
waited long enough to refill the lamp with water before rising to
begin the hazardous climb--which, after all, might net him nothing,
unless it were a broken bone or two if he lost his footing and fell
again.

Abington’s work had given him the sureness of a mountain goat. He
took off his necktie, tied it like a bandeau around his head, hooked
the lamp securely in its fabric and began to climb, resolutely
pushing far from him the thought of failure.

How far he went, he did not know. All he was certain of was the
impossibility of going back. There were times when he hung by a
slender foothold and risked his neck while he rested his hands.
There were other times when he was almost ready to give it up,
almost but never wholly beaten.

“By Jove, this is a high mountain!” he gasped once when, having
found a fairly comfortable perch on a knob of rock the size of a
barrel, he very gingerly removed the lamp from his forehead and took
a more comprehensive survey of his immediate surroundings and the
wall above him. “I’ll swear I’ve climbed ten miles!” This was a very
unscientific assertion to make. He capped it at once by another.
“Bet I’ve passed a dozen lateral fissures on the way up.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Having relieved the tension somewhat by that remark, he slowly
turned himself about and illumined with white light an arched
opening in the wall that half faced him around the curve of the
cavern. “I’ll be damned!” breathed John Abington but what he really
meant was: “Thank God!”

The six feet of sheer wall which stood between his perch and the
mouth of the passageway balked him for a time, until he saw that the
rock immediately above the opening broke smoothly for several feet,
even with the face of the wall. The rock floor of the tunnel
extended outward over the black abyss from which he had just
climbed; it was like a pursed lip thrust out from an open mouth, he
thought.

Upon that narrow platform he fixed his gaze, shrewdly measuring the
width of the extension. He would have to climb above the opening and
drop down to the out-thrust lip, trusting to good fortune to keep
his balance and not pitch headlong into the cavern.

For a long moment he stood face to face with this fresh ordeal, the
lamplight sliding back and forth, halting to contemplate a feasible
niche for his feet, stealing upward to find some splinter or seam
where the fingers could clutch.

Foot by foot he planned it, while he gathered his last reserve of
strength for this supreme effort. Once he started, there could be no
going back. He must work above the smooth stretch, where, at some
time in the past, a huge fragment of wall had fallen away, and then
edge sidewise until he was directly over the lip of the tunnel.

After that he must let go all holds and drop. If he landed on the
lip and stayed there, he would at least have a chance. If not--the
evil death of a certainty would be his; for even if he landed
uninjured in the pool he would never be able to repeat that terrific
climb. He knew that he would not even attempt it.

Doggedly, with that persistence which characterized the man,
Abington began the ascent. He reached the exact point which he had
planned to reach, drew one long breath in the full knowledge that it
might be his last--and dropped. The impact of solid rock upon his
boot soles jarred him as he flung himself forward and fell face
downward on the floor of the passage.




CHAPTER X--TRACKS IN THE DUST


When Abington came to himself he was in darkness, the lamp having
fallen on its side and gone out. Whether he had fainted, slept or
merely lost consciousness for a moment he could not tell, nor did he
ponder it much. The fact that his toes hung over the edge set him
crawling forward on his hands and knees, obeying the primal instinct
of self-preservation.

He wanted no more of that particular abysm. Until he had put several
yards between himself and what seemed to him now a black, bottomless
void, he did not think of the lamp.

When he finally forced himself to stop and light it he discovered
that he was in a fairly level passage, the walls covered with
carvings wherein the same chain of evil predominated. These
hieroglyphics won only a cursory glance, however, as he got
painfully upon his feet and started forward, steadying himself
against the wall as he went.

A cool breath of air in his face was his first intimation that he
was nearing the outdoor world. In spite of a stiffness in his joints
and muscles he found himself moving almost at a run and the
consciousness of his nervous haste brought a faint grin of amusement
to his face. John Abington was more anxious to see daylight than he
ever had been in his life--and the first man to laugh over the
experience would be John Abington himself.

Nevertheless he did not slacken his pace until he arrived at a sharp
turning where a gray light dimmed the white flame of his lamp.

He stopped before a crack twice the width of his palm, through which
the dawn wind came blowing gratefully in his face. Directly across
from him, but fifty feet lower and separated by a hundred-foot
chasm, a broad ridge extended out into the valley; and as he looked
two bighorn sheep came trotting up a faint trail and disappeared
among the higher crags.

“That’s where the shooting took place,” Abington told himself.
“Wonder if Bill’s been hunting? Took my rifle. Have to give it back.
Well--at least I can see daylight!”

The lazy clouds above the valley blossomed suddenly into radiant
hues. The gaunt hills blushed and the cañons all seemed bathed in
crimson and yellow flames. As through the narrow window of a belfry
tower, Abington gazed down on a world of magnificent peaks and crags
flaunting their bold reds and yellow beneath a redder sunrise.

For the moment the scene held him, then he turned back to the
problem of finding a way out; for although a glimpse of the outside
world was heartening, he could not squeeze through an eight-inch
split in the rock. There must be some other exit. He turned away
from the window and went on.

The passage took another twist and he entered a roughly outlined
room into which the daylight seeped through several fissures between
the shattered blocks of sandstone; high overhead most of them were,
although two or three were low enough to serve as narrow windows.

A square boulder, the top hollowed in the shape of a rounded trough,
stood in the center of the chamber. Otherwise the room was empty,
unless the intricate mass of carved symbols might be classed as
furnishings, for the walls were covered with them.

Abington’s spirits rose, though he paid little attention to the
writings. To him they proved, as did the boulder which he recognized
as a sacrificial altar, that this was a chamber much used by the
ancients. Since the route by which he had entered could not be
called a thoroughfare, there would be another way out, possibly
several.

Within two minutes he had found the passage, and something else.
There on the rock floor which slanted down from the chamber on the
side opposite the one by which he had entered, was a cigarette stub;
it was one of the oval kind he himself always smoked. He stooped and
picked it up, his black eyebrows lifted in surprise.

“Never reached this point yesterday--h’m! Bill not only borrowed my
gun and went hunting last night, but did a little exploring on his
own account. Looking for me, perhaps. No, Bill was scouting around
for himself. H’m! Growing surly and quarrelsome, pretending a
distrust he can’t actually feel, hoping I’d give him an excuse to
turn on me. Wonder, now, if Bill didn’t raid his own cave and hide
the stuff!

“A full burro load of grub--with gun and ammunition he could live
all winter--h’m!” He went on: “Looking now for a hideout--place
where I can’t find him! Bill, my lad, you should pay more attention
to details; one little oversight--such as a cigarette stub--has
hanged a man before now. A good inch and a half of tobacco wasted
here. You’ll be wanting a cigarette very badly, Bill, before you get
another supply, remember.”

He laid the stub down where he had found it and went on, haggard
eyes peering this way and that, seeking further signs of the
traitor’s presence. If Bill had been looking for his partner, then
it was an odd twist of circumstance that had sent them both
wandering around in the same labyrinth of caves and complicated
katabothra without once permitting them to meet. If, on the other
hand, Bill had been hunting a hiding place which Abington would
never find--and the archaeologist was certain this was the case--he
had a surprise in store.

Just now Abington wanted most of all to get out of there and find
his way back to their camp, where there should be food. If
not--well, he had his automatic; he had seen game; and he was a
fairly accurate shot. He would not starve.

The passage sharply descended, as so many others had done. Abington
went cautiously, lighting both walls and watching for obscure
openings which for all he knew might be the one he should take. This
whole country seemed to have been the playground of Vulcan, who rent
mountains asunder, twisted whole ranges of hills and broke them into
fragments and flung them aside when fresh land appeared above the
great Sonora Sea and caught his sportive fancy.

Just here the shattered formation of the old volcanic fissure lay in
blocks that had been roughly hewn into the crude semblance of steps,
down which Abington went slowly, choosing his footing with the
deliberation of excessive weariness. His thirty-six-hour fast and
that terrific climb up from the Pool of Evil Death--from the
writings he had so named the place--had taken more out of him than
he realized, until he began to negotiate this rather difficult
descent. But he kept going, that cigarette stub serving now to urge
him forward.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Stumbling from hunger and weariness, Abington emerged into another
cavern of considerable extent and showing unmistakable signs of
human occupancy in bygone ages. Crude pots--most of them
broken--stood against the walls. Stone implements of various kinds,
all thickly covered with dust, lay scattered about; and on the
dust-strewn floor were the plain imprints of hiking boots. Bill,
then, had visited this cavern, which proved that so far Abington had
kept to the right trail.

Tilting the lamp so that the light shone on the floor, he went
forward, following the boot tracks in the dust. Through winding
passages they led him--Abington might have become lost again had not
those footprints pointed the way--and so into a chamber where was
piled a little heap of things which Abington recognized as a part of
his own outfit and the things Bill had declared were stolen from his
cave across the valley.

The treachery of the act stabbed through Abington’s weary
consciousness and merged into a malicious satisfaction. At any rate
the spot had been well chosen, for here was water trickling down a
rift in the wall, tinkling into a tiny basin hewn out of the rock by
some other hands than Bill’s.

Abington sank to his knees and drank thirstily, then clawed at the
pile of stuff, found a tin of corned beef and cut it open with his
knife. It was not what he would have chosen for a meal, but it would
serve. There was plenty of water at hand. He ate all of the corned
beef, drank again and withdrew to a sandy niche where he felt fairly
sure of hearing Bill if he returned; laid himself down under a
shelving projection of rock, put out his lamp and went thankfully to
sleep.




CHAPTER XI--ROARING GUNS


Refreshed, Abington awoke with a sunbeam shining fair in his eyes.
Just at first he failed to orient himself and thought he was in the
cave with Bill. But this cavern was larger and the crevices high up
on the wall, between the broken masses of rock, let in a westering
sun and a breeze straight off the desert. He was hungry again and
the salt beef had given him a burning thirst.

He wondered if Bill had returned while he slept. It was quite
likely, he thought, and having no wish to be discovered just yet, he
crept very slowly from his place of concealment, careful to keep in
the shadows beneath the jutting wall.

For some time he waited and listened, but the only sounds he heard
were the tinkling of the little spring and the shrill chirping of a
few cedar birds that had made their home in the crannies of the roof
and were very busy with their own small affairs.

Abington grinned to himself as he cautiously approached the little
pile of supplies and began a more careful investigation than he had
attempted that morning. Two pounds of chewing tobacco--most
convincingly had Bill bewailed the loss of those plugs, he
remembered. He counted half a dozen cans of corned beef, one of the
variations in diet which had been made possible by having three pack
burros. Had Bill really imagined he could make Abington believe that
the gosh-awful had carried off chewing tobacco and corned beef in
cans?

In the face of their loss of the burros Abington had not given much
thought to the missing articles from Bill’s outfit. He had visited
the cave, viewed the apparent aimlessness of the demolition, had
looked for tracks, and, having found the giant sheep tracks in the
bottom of the cañon, paid no more attention to the wreckage.

“Bill must have hurried back across the valley after this stuff--no,
certain details contradict that,” Abington said to himself. “He must
have carried all this stuff on his back, along with what I gave him.
Not very bulky--he could have concealed it all in his pack, easily
enough. Pretty heavy load it would make! No wonder Bill was grouchy!
Took advantage of the gosh-awful’s work and held out a few supplies
on me. Clever--but then, the sheriff’s experience with Bill should
have warned me to be on the lookout for tricks.”

Abington helped himself to what food he could stow in his pockets,
dined on another can of corned beef, took a long drink at the spring
and refilled his carbide lamp before he started out again. His plans
had changed altogether since he discovered the food cache.

He no longer wanted to get back to the cave where he and Bill had
camped, for he did not believe that Bill would be there, nor any of
the supplies, and if there were fossilized human skeletons in this
region he felt that he would find them just as easily without Bill.

The way out of this particular cavern led him down through another
crevice, blocky and splintered as if the whole peak had been twisted
asunder; and for the greater part of the distance it was open to the
sky.

There were places where it would even have been possible for a man
to climb up out of the crevice. But the day was too far gone and
Abington had no intention of spending another night underground in
aimless wanderings, nor to roost on some dangerous pinnacle until
morning.

He emerged at last on a narrow ridge that stood like the crest of a
huge, petrified wave between the peak he was leaving and another not
quite so high. Intuitively he identified it as the ridge he had
dubbed the rooster’s comb--and knew that if he were right he must
have come a long way underground. For the cave where he and Bill had
spent the night together and from which he had started on his
subterranean journey was considerably more than half a mile from the
ridge where he had seen the light.

Again the high peaks were gilded with sunlight while the lower
slopes glowed scarlet and the deeper shadows merged into warm
purple. No artist would ever have dared to mix those barbaric
colors, even for a desert sunset; and if he had dared his hand must
have lacked the cunning of the Master Painter who daily wrought his
magic here on these wild hills where men so seldom ventured.

Abington looked down a sheer wall of rock to a deep basin where
grass grew and a round pool of water held like a mirror the
rose-tinted reflection of the cloud straight overhead. One steep
trail led down the farther hillside to the pool and as he gazed a
mountain sheep went bounding up that trail. On the brink of the pool
stood a man foreshortened to the height of a boy. He seemed to be
staring after the sheep.

“Bill! Oh, Bill!” Abington shouted between cupped hands. For the
moment he had quite forgotten Bill’s treachery, in his human
reaction to the sight of a familiar figure after the ordeal he had
just passed through. “Oh, Bill! Hey!”

The man’s face was upturned, staring. Then he raised his rifle and
fired point-blank at Abington. The bullet struck a rock close by,
ricochetted and nicked Abington across the forearm.

“You poisonous reptile!” snarled Abington, and whipped out his
automatic.

At his first shot the figure went sprawling; tried to get up, fell
back and lay still. Abington watched him, a bit heartsick over the
excellence of his shot. He had never taken much to the manly sport
of planting leaden pellets in living bodies, but since his work took
him into the wild places of the world he had learned to shoot
straight because it seemed to him a necessary accomplishment.
Besides, straight shooting made an enormous saving in ammunition.

“You would have it,” he grunted remorsefully. “Any jury would agree
that my life is of more use to the world than yours--and since you
are the killing kind it--”

Down in the basin the wounded man struggled to hands and knees and
began crawling; slowly, stopping every moment or two, going on,
crawling in an aimless circle most horrible to watch.

An oath voiced at random jarred out of Abington’s throat. He half
raised the automatic, lowered it, shook his head. He couldn’t do it.
But neither could he leave man nor animal crawling blindly,
aimlessly around until he died. Abington looked again and turned
away sickened at that creeping, groping, stricken thing hemmed in by
the crimson rocks that rimmed the basin.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Without any clear purpose Abington started down the ridge, looking
for some break in the cliff that separated him from the basin by a
scant two hundred feet. He had no doubt that Bill Jonathan was done
for; the automatic was a wicked weapon; the range was short.

When in the dusk he came slipping and sliding down an old sheep
trail long since abandoned for a more favored path, however, there
was no wounded man to be seen in the little basin. Like a shot quail
that flutters for a moment among the bushes and is lost, the man
somehow had managed to crawl away and disappear.

Abington called Bill’s name again and again while he lighted the
carbide lamp. And as the white light sprang out and drove back the
shadows, a gunshot roared just under the cliff for answer to his
hail.

As he leaped sidewise, Abington shut off the lamp, then rushed the
spot where the gun had flashed. By good luck he spied the vague bulk
just as the rifle was being painfully lifted for another shot. He
snatched at the barrel and wrenched the gun free--by the feeble
resistance of the other gauging shrewdly his waning strength.

“Venomous kind of snake, aren’t you?” Abington observed with pitying
contempt, as he leaned the rifle against the cliff and started to
relight the lamp.

The light flared up. Abington stooped, gave a shocked exclamation as
he started back, recovered himself and stooped again. The man was
not Bill Jonathan, but a gaunt old fellow with high cheek bones and
a straight gash of a mouth drawing an evil line through his grizzled
beard. He was a total stranger, wounded and collapsed against the
cliff; beaten and utterly passive now, like a trapped animal that
will not move unless it sees some chance of escape.

“By Jove, I’m glad it wasn’t Bill, at any rate!” Abington ejaculated
as he knelt to make a superficial examination. “Shot through the
side,” he diagnosed to himself. “Well below the heart. Serious
enough, but by no means fatal with the proper care--and that is
going to be something of a problem in existing conditions. Might
better have made a clean job of it--glad I didn’t, though.

“Well,” he asked aloud, “where’s your camp? If it doesn’t involve
too much climbing I’ll try and get you home.” He waited while the
old man’s eyes remained fixed on him with a baleful stare. “Doesn’t
understand, maybe.”

He tried French, German and a passable Italian, keenly watching the
eyes that never once changed their homicidal glare. He sat back on
his haunches and studied the glowering face with less personal
emotion than he would have displayed before an odd pattern of the
Maya death mask, and decided that the man had understood his first
question well enough and was merely stubborn.

“Of course, if you want to lie here all night, that’s your
privilege, I suppose,” Abington said finally, standing up and
glancing around at the confining walls of the dusk-filled basin. He
turned the light again on the old man’s forbidding countenance, made
more sinister by the pain he was suffering.

“Are your field glasses equipped with night lenses?” Abington asked
abruptly, and silently laughed at the startled wavering of those
colorless eyes.

“Thought so! Now, since you do understand plain English, let me urge
you to tell me where I’ll find your camp. Of course you have one,
for you’re too well nourished and too well dressed to be living off
the country. You won’t talk? Then you are likely to catch cold in
that wound, lying out here all night. And I can assure you that a
bullet wound--especially in the body--can give plenty of trouble if
neglected.”

The thin, vindictive mouth, clamped shut in that thick unkempt
beard, might have been dumb for all the sound that issued from it.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Abington rose and went seeking here and there with a light hoping to
discover some sign of a camp, or at least a trail that would lead to
one. He did not succeed, but he did find the field glasses which had
been dropped or cannily hidden under a bush, where they might have
been overlooked if the light had not brought a reflection from the
lenses. He was looking them over when, from up on the ridge where
the sheep had disappeared, a voice that could belong to no man save
Bill shouted anxiously:

“Hullo! That you down there, professor?”

Abington swung the lamp toward the sound, moving it three times up
and-down, the signal to advance which they had found convenient in
old caves and tunnels where a shout might bring down upon their
heads a small avalanche of loose rock.

“Was that you shooting? You hurt?”

“Come on down, Bill,” Abington called. “There’s a path, if you can
find it in the dark.” And as an afterthought, he added: “No, I’m not
hurt.”

Good old Bill, to ask that question with just that demanding note of
worry in his voice! Abington remembered what he had been thinking
when he pulled and aimed his automatic, and he had the conscience to
blush for the thought. Of course Bill was no traitor! His eager,
hurried voice betrayed long hours of frantic searching in that maze
of narrow gorges that twisted and turned and crisscrossed so
bewilderingly.

Abington smiled under his beard as he listened to the clattering of
small rocks on the hillside beyond the pool. Presently Bill
Jonathan’s familiar figure--never had Abington seen a more welcome
sight!--came lurching into the light zone, half running, with that
little swing of the shoulders that told of strength.

“My Lord, professor, I’ve been runnin’ these hills like a rabid kit
fox, lookin’ for you!” he panted, laying both hands on Abington’s
shoulders and giving him an affectionate shake or two. “Why, you old
vinegarroon, I’ve been scared to look off a cliff or into a pot hole
for fear I’d see a coyote sneakin’ away from your ornery carcass!
Thought sure that gosh-awful thing had got you!” He stopped to
breathe. “Who was doing that shootin’? You?”

Abington nodded, a bit surprised at the lump in his throat which
prevented speech.

“Shootin’ at the gosh-awful? You git it?” Bill’s voice dropped to a
vengeful whisper as he sent a wholly involuntary glance behind him.

“No, Bill, I didn’t. Some one down here took a shot at me and I shot
back. He’s lying over here by the cliff.”

“Yeah?” Astonishment pulled Bill’s hand off the other’s shoulder.
“Who do you reckon-- Was it an officer?” An indefinable change had
crept into his voice.

“No, I don’t think so. He isn’t dead yet. Come over and take a look.
We’ll have to do something--get him into a shelter of some kind.
These nights are too chilly for a wounded man to lie out
unprotected.”

Once more Abington was calm and cool and efficient. He turned and
led the way back to the wounded man, Bill Jonathan following at his
heels quite as if there had been neither quarrel nor separation to
jar them out of the routine of the trail.




CHAPTER XII--THE MAN WHO VANISHED


Bill got up off his knees, glanced this way and that as though
looking for something of which he stood in urgent need, and turned a
bleak gaze again upon the huddled figure on the ground.

“We better get a fire started,” he said to Abington, unconsciously
taking the initiative as if this was his own particular affair and
he alone must acquit himself well in the emergency. “I’ll scout
around with the light. Maybe I can find a cave--his camp, if it’s
down in here. Don’t suppose he’ll jar loose any information--”

Bill continued to stare down at the man, his underjaw thrust out and
in his face a certain implacable hardness that brought him a second
puzzled glance from Abington.

“Where’s your camp?” Bill demanded abruptly.

The man seemed to draw himself together as if he feared a blow. The
murderous eyes flinched away from Bill’s relentless stare. “Find
out--if you think--you can!” he snarled.

“Oh, I’ll find it! Don’t you worry a minute,” Bill said viciously.
“If necessary, you’ll tell where it is.”

“I won’t tell you. You can go ahead--kill me--be done with it--” The
wounded man defied him weakly.

“Who, me?” The savage bitterness of Bill’s laugh was a revelation to
Abington. “Me kill you? I should sa-ay not! You mind what I told you
two years ago, Jack! That still goes. Don’t think you can die and
duck out from under in that way. I’ll nurse you like a sick baby!
You’ll get well, see? Well enough to travel, anyway.” He turned
abruptly away as if he would not trust himself to say more.

Presently a fire was crackling beside the cliff and Bill had brought
water in his hat for Abington’s use in cleansing the wound.

“Fix him up best you can, professor,” said Bill. “Then if you can
make out with the fire for light, I’ll borrow the lamp and beat it
over to where I cached our stuff. There’s that first-aid kit we
saved outa the wreck; I’ll bring it and some grub. It ain’t far.
Just over the ridge, half a mile, maybe.”

He drew Abington to one side, out of hearing of the wounded man.
“That’s Jack Huntley, professor. He’s got to be put in shape for the
trip in to Vegas. It’s a matter of life and death. So do what you
can--I know you’re a pretty good doctor when it comes to a pinch.
I’ll be right back. Well--hang onto him, professor, till I get back
with the stuff. Don’t let him sneak out on you!”

“If he does,” said Abington grimly, “it will be because he sneaks
into the next world. I’ll try and not let that happen, Bill, my
lad.”

He stood watching the round zone of white light go dancing away and
up the hill without any visible means of locomotion, since Bill
walked behind it, slipping from rock to rock, pausing and poising
here, flitting on again like Peter Pan’s good fairy Tinker Bell. A
fantastic comparison in that wild glen where men of past ages had
met for their wooing or their warring or to hide from strange beasts
that roamed the valley; where even now the air seemed charged with a
malignant kind of hate, and with fear that passed all reason--since
the man called Jack Huntley had been assured of the best care they
could give him.

All the while Abington sat by the fire and waited for Bill, he felt
the cold malevolence of the soul behind those staring eyes and the
close-shut lips. Though the fancy did not trouble him, it seemed too
that the shades of those savage ones of long ago hovered
inquisitively in the shadows that fringed the firelight; timid wild
folk who dared not walk boldly among these strange men of a later
age, yet lingered, curious to see what grim drama was about to be
played here where the stage was set with the somber trappings more
suited to an old Greek tragedy than of everyday life.

The return of Bill, heavily burdened and with the white light
dancing impishly before him, did not spoil the illusion but served
instead to deepen it; for the crudely efficient surgery was
completed in silence or curt undertones that held a sinister quality
of ominous reserve. The white light painted grotesque shadows on the
brown-sandstone cliff beside them, gigantic caricatures of men in
gruesome pantomime that might have been the enactment of a torture
scene, with two fiends performing demoniac rites over some luckless
victim.

Bill afterward boiled coffee and mixed a bannock in which he stirred
small fragments of cold fried bacon left over from his supper.
Abington ate ravenously, and afterward the two smoked beside the
fire, Jack Huntley lying wrapped in their two blankets.

As the Great Dipper tilted more and more toward the polestar, fever
unlocked the stubborn lips of the wounded man and he muttered
endlessly, his sordid secrets betrayed with pitiless repetition. All
about millions in carnetite, he babbled, and how “they” would never
get it away from him, because he was too smart for them; it was
crazy talk, interrupted whenever Abington bent over him ministering
to his comfort, doing what he could to allay the fever.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Beside the fire Bill Jonathan brooded, lifting his head to listen
when the fellow’s delirium seemed to take a different turn, or some
movement roused him from his somber meditations.

Dawn was beginning to work its daily miracle on hills and sky when
Bill replenished the fire and turned to Abington, who was sitting
with lean fingers clasped around his knees and a cold pipe dangling
from between his teeth.

“What do you think of the case, professor? Think he’ll get well, all
right?” Bill’s tone made the question seem only the preliminary to
what was really in his mind.

Abington yawned. “No reason why he shouldn’t, Bill. I recovered the
bullet; it’s a clean wound and no vital organs were injured. He
should get well without much trouble--if proper care is used.”

Bill turned away without a word, though it was plain that his mind
was full of troubled thoughts. They cooked breakfast and ate in
silence. The wounded man had fallen asleep, with the sunlight softly
warm on his blanketed shoulder.

Once Bill turned his head and stared long at the man, then looked at
Abington, lips parted for speech that after all was withheld.
Abington lifted an eyebrow inquiringly and Bill looked away.

“What’s on your mind?” Abington asked finally, setting down his
empty cup. “They say confession is good for the soul.”

“Yeah. So’s a few other things. Come on over here on these rocks,
professor. That old possum is liable to be listenin’.”

“I don’t think so,” Abington cheerfully disagreed, but he followed
Bill to a pile of boulders some distance away, where they could talk
without disturbing the patient, or being overheard by him.

“Now, there’s a question I’d like to ask you, professor. Who did you
think you was shootin’ at last night, when you ventilated Jack
Huntley’s liver?”

Abington’s lips twitched. “At you, Bill.”

“Yeah?” Bill’s jaw stiffened. “Want another try?”

“No, I don’t think so. This man has complicated matters, but he has
also cleared up a few things for me.”

“Yeah, and he’ll clear up more--for me,” Bill opined. “If it’s a
fair question, I’d like to know where you’ve been since yesterday.”

“Well, not to relate all of my thrilling adventures, I have been
wandering around through a series of caves and in the course of time
I found myself in a cavern in the top of that peak up there. I judge
it to be the one where I saw the reflection of the sun on field
glasses. While trying to find my way out of there, I picked up a
half-smoked cigarette, of the oval kind which I use.”

“Yeah? One of the flat ones? Kinda backtracked yourself, eh?”

“No-o--for very good reasons I knew that I had never been there
before. I thought I had crossed your trail, Bill, my lad.”

“Not mine, professor.” Bill shook his head. “I’ve been huntin’ the
hills over by our cave, lookin’ for you. I was workin’ over this way
when I heard the shootin’ last night.”

“Yes. Well, a bit later I came across a cache of food taken from our
outfit across the valley.”

“The hell you did!” Bill started, and nearly dropped his cigarette.
“You sure?”

“Absolutely sure. I ate two cans of our Imperial corned
beef--breakfast and dinner. I expected you to show up there, but of
course you didn’t. It would make a splendid hideout, Bill. There’s a
spring, and cracks in the rock let in sunlight, a perfect retreat.
Impossible to come at one from the rear--”

Abington paused and his shoulders moved involuntarily. He was
thinking of the Pool of Evil Death. “I’ll show you the place. When I
am through in this country you’ll find it useful, no doubt.”

“Not unless Jack Huntley dies. If I can ever get him in somehow to
the sheriff, I won’t need to hide out in the hills. Unless,” Bill
added dubiously, “they cinch me for that car I run over the cliff.”
His eyes clouded. He had forgotten about the destruction of that
car.

“I expect they’d hand me about five years for that,” he added
gloomily, after a pause. “Where’s the way into that cave of yours?”

“I’d have to lead you to the spot and show you. There’s time enough.
I shall want to go back and make a thorough examination of the place
for science.”

Bill looked up. “I’ll have to disappoint you about them stone men,
professor, I run acrost the cañon yesterday where the hole went into
the cave. There’s been a big slide in there. I couldn’t tell within
a hundred feet, where the opening used to be. We’d have to tear down
the whole mountain to find it.”

Abington said nothing. Creeping into his mind again came suspicion.
Had Bill ever known where there was such a cave? Surely that slide
had chosen a most convenient time and place for Bill Jonathan!

“I know where it was,” Bill said doggedly, as if he read the
thought. “I can show you the slide; you can see it for yourself,
professor.”

“My college of science is not collecting slides,” Abington drawled.
“Well, I must be getting back to my patient. If he’s awake, he may
want to eat something.”

He rose, but Bill had not finished, it seemed. He remained seated on
the rock hunched over his cigarette and staring morosely across the
little lake.

“So you think I lied to you,” muttered Bill. “You think I’ve been
stalling you along! That goes kinda tough, professor. I’ve been
dodgin’ around in the hills--yes, sure I have! But I ain’t going to
dodge no more and you can go to hell and hunt your own Adamses. You
wait till I lead that bird in to the sheriff and make him come
clean! It’s him that’ll take a ride to Carson--not me.”

“And the car?” Abington asked softly, his beard hiding a smile.

“Aw, hell!” growled Bill, jerked back to harsh realities.

In his bitterness over the sudden frustration of his hopes, Abington
would not speak a word of comfort. Not even the rich storehouse of
ancient records in the labyrinth of caves could quite console him at
the moment, his heart had been so set on taking back to his college
a fossilized man of the Cretaceous period.

He walked moodily over to the makeshift bed of his patient and
stared blankly. There was no patient. A shout brought Bill and the
two nosed along the cliff like hounds baffled over a warm trail
suddenly wiped out with water.

Because the man had been obliged to crawl, it was manifestly
impossible for him to get far. Even so, they were a good half hour
in running him down and then it was the slight indentations of his
knees in a skift of sand behind a bush that gave the clew.

Bill went down on all fours and disappeared. After a minute or two,
Abington followed.

It might have been an oversized badger hole, so far as outward
appearances went. Even in his haste the trained mind of Abington
noted a cunning arrangement of rocks deliberately piled haphazard
against the cliff at some time long past, as the twisted roots of
old bushes and trees clinging the twining down through the
dirt-filled interstices gave mute testimony.

Yet the rock pile was in reality a solid, arched covering for the
sloped entrance to another cave, in the mouth of which Jack Huntley
lay sweating with the pain of his wound, as frenziedly malevolent as
a rattler pinned under a rock.

Kneeling facing each other with the wounded man gasping curses
between them, Abington and Bill Jonathan locked glances; Abington’s
eyes coldly searching; Bill’s defiant, hurt and trying to cover a
certain wistfulness he would have denied with much profanity.

“He’s got to clear me with the law!” Bill said between clenched
jaws. “He’s the only man on earth that can do it. He pulled the
robbery they laid onto me and if he don’t come clean I’ll kill him
inch by inch!”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Jack Huntley turned his head and sent a glance to Bill’s face;
shifted his eyes to Abington’s, that were black as ebony and quite
as hard; turned again to Bill and met a cold stare that shriveled
his courage to whining cowardice.

“Don’t you, Bill! I--I’m done for! You can’t hurt a dying man! You
wouldn’t have the heart!”

“Oh, wouldn’t I?” Bill’s laugh was in itself a threat. “Say! I got
about as much heart as them stone men we’re after. You wait and see
how much heart I’ve got for you--you hound!”

“It’s murder!” Jack Huntley’s voice rose to a shriek. “You wouldn’t
stand by and see him kill a man that--that’s all shot up--” His eyes
turned glassily to Abington.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Never had Abington’s voice been more casually
brutal. “You’re going to die anyway, you know.”

“Yeah, and you won’t die so darned peaceful, either,” Bill added
darkly.

“Of course you can save yourself a good deal of suffering,” Abington
pointed out in his calm professional tone, “by writing a full
confession. In that case I should feel obliged to protect you from
Bill’s vengeful nature.”

“It’s worse than Injuns!” Huntley cried, his fear rising to panic.

“Not if you write the truth,” Abington pointed out, taking from an
inner pocket a water-warped notebook. “Here’s a fountain pen which
may contain enough ink, unless you wax overeloquent. Write the
truth, Huntley. I’ll take care of Bill.”

“You’ll have a hell of a time, professor, if he don’t clean his
dirty soul right down to the bottom!”

“I’ll have to be raised up,” whined the sick man, darting furtive
glances here and there as if, even yet, he hoped by some miracle to
escape.

“For legal purposes,” Abington directed, holding Huntley up and
giving Bill a quelling look, “begin like this: ‘I, Jack Huntley, of
sound mind--and of my own free will--do hereby confess--that on
the--’”

It was Bill himself who named the date, snapping the words out with
a savage click of the teeth.




CHAPTER XIII--A CLEVER IDEA


Halting, hating to set down in plain words the full extent of his
guilt, driven to it by the relentless promptings of Bill, Jack
Huntley wrote three precious pages, that would make interesting
reading for the county officials, before he signed his name.
Abington saw the teary warning of the pen going dry and dropping
blots on the book, and signed his name as a witness before all the
ink ran out. The thing was done.

Bill threw back his shoulders with an unconscious gesture of relief,
and stepped away. “Now, die and be damned to you!” he said as he
turned his back and walked off.

Abington looked after him grinning. “This is where he holes up,
Bill. He should have a pretty fair equipment. Better explore around
a little. I have carbide tied up in my handkerchief, if you need the
lamp. But the place seems well lighted from above.”

“Yeah, I’m sure goin’ to look around. I believe he’s the one
poisoned our burros. I bet--”

Abington looked up, got to his feet and started toward Bill, who had
given a sudden bellowing whoop.

“Well, the hound!” Bill was balancing two large mescal stalks in his
hands. Light they were as cork, tough as bamboo, large at the base
as Bill’s muscular leg above the knee. Three feet from the base of
each was a foot rest, lashed securely to the stalk.

“There’s the gosh-awful!” Bill said in the incredulous tone of one
who can scarcely believe his own eyes. “Look at how them sticks is
cut on the bottom, professor! Sheep hoofs to a T. Stilts! And that’s
how the thing took such long steps and got over the country so
almighty mysterious!”

“Ingenious!” Abington declared, balancing the stilts in his hands
before he stood them against the wall of the cave. “Simple, too. I
had a suspicion of some such thing, but dismissed it as impractical
in so rough a country.”

“I dunno. They’re light as paper. They could be carried easy enough
on rocky ground, and just used for sand and gravel.” He paused. “Now
I know he poisoned the burros. He seen your camp set up in plain
sight, and come straddlin’ over there. A feller can cover a lot of
country on stilts, once he gets used to walking on them. I used to
when I was a kid.”

Abington, however, was not quite satisfied. There lacked the motive
and he spoke of it. “If he had raided camps and carried off the
supplies, I could understand it. But this attempt at terrorization,
and the insane destruction of good food, does not come within the
bounds of logic.”

“Yeah, but you don’t know that bird like I do,” returned Bill. “He’s
what God used for a pattern when He made the first drove of hogs.
You mind all that talk last night? That about having millions in
carnetite, and being richer than Rockefeller? Jack thinks he’s got
hold of something in here and he’s been trying to scare everybody
off. Maybe he’s got something worth holdin’ on to and maybe he
ain’t. If he has, I sure feel I’m entitled to grab it!”

Abington was walking around the roomy chamber, flicking this thing
and that thing with a glance, overlooking nothing. He stooped over a
pile of whitish rock stained thickly with great blobs of bright
yellow, selected a lump and looked up, seeking an opening where the
strongest light fell through. He went over and stood under the
light, turning the rock this way and that while he examined it
through a miner’s glass.

“So this is his millions in carnetite!” he said contemptuously at
last, tossing the sample to Bill, who caught it dexterously as a
catcher cups palms for a ball. “More than one poor devil has been
fooled by limonite. That’s what this is, if I am not badly mistaken,
a yellow ocher, resembling carnetite. There’s your revenge. Bill. Go
tell him his millions in carnetite are just a dream. Tell him it’s
limonite. If he’s greedy as you say, that will be punishment
enough.”

“Not when he thinks he’s dying,” Bill grumbled. “He won’t give a
darn. What’s he flopping around like that for?” he asked sharply.
“Something bite him, do you s’pose? If it did, it’ll die,” he went
on sententiously.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Abington ran over to where Jack Huntley lay on the ground. He could
do nothing, with the primitive means at hand. Huntley had indeed
been bitten--by death. Whether the wound had been more serious than
Abington diagnosed it, or whether he had injured himself in crawling
to the cave, they could not of course do more than guess. Within
half an hour Jack Huntley lay dead on the floor of the cave.

“This means that I must go in and have a talk with the sheriff,”
Abington observed. “A mere formality, but one I prefer not to
neglect. Want to come along, Bill? I’ll pay them for the car, far as
that goes.”

“Yeah, I guess maybe I better go in and have it over with. I’ll pay
you back in work, professor, if you’ll go ahead and settle for that
darn car I wrecked. But don’t let ’em stick you on the price of it.
It wasn’t worth more’n two or three hundred dollars.”

“I’m a fair judge of cars,” Abington remarked. “It will be all
right, Bill.”

“Yeah. And when we come back in here with a fresh outfit, professor,
we better bring along a couple of good muckers and some powder. I
believe I can maybe locate the hole into that cave, if I can take my
time and have some help. Or maybe we can find another way in there.
We sure oughta come fixed to spend the whole winter in here. I found
a lot more carvings than I’d ever saw before.”

Abington laughed to himself, and clapped a hand down on Bill’s
shoulder. “Bill, my lad, that’s the true scientific spirit! You’ll
be an Adam chaser as long as you live, now you’ve started.”

“Yeah,” said Bill, staring around him at the encircling red hills.
“They’re in here somewhere, professor. Eight feet tall and big
accordin’. No foolin’. I seen ’em myself. Well, let’s bury the dead
and get ready and beat it. We want to get back in here while the
good weather holds.”

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