Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

designs were somewhat vague and fluid as den watercourses, in pot-holes or crevices where yet.

No time was lost in following up the reservoir party; but neither at the Summit nor from any of Norrisson's men could a word be learned of Alan. No one had seen or heard of him since he turned his back on the tents and struck out across the sage-brush. At the engineers' camp on the Lower Snake all news of him ceased as if the plains had opened and swallowed him. In Alan's case a wild figure of speech had come literally true. The boy's brown cheeks were whitening in one of those oubliettes which occur as part of the black lava formation that is the floor of the Snake River plains; a floor continuous and solid for the most part, but strangely cracked and riven, undermined in places, and pierced with holes resembling the bull's-eye of a vault. Into one of these traps Alan had descended; no one seeing him go down but Modoc, who stood long, and waited, and tugged at his rope halter, and pawed the dirt and stones, and neighed to his master in vain.

IX.

THE evening Alan camped with the engineers some of the boys were telling stories around the fire in front of the office-tent. They spoke of the wonders and mysteries of the great lava desert, which mantles in dust and silence all that region north of the Snake for four hundred miles of its course between river and mountains. Camp-fire gossip, in these arid lands, runs much upon discoveries of water, as in the mountains of the same region it runs upon rich finds of gold. One of the boys who had been a stock-herder told of a pool or well in the heart of the Black Lava the water of which was fresh, though defiled at the time of his discovery by carcasses of dead cattle; the poor beasts, mad with thirst, had crowded upon it when all the streams were frozen, and perished through overweighting the ice which covered the pool. The depth of it was unknown. It was said to go down to the level of that fabled underground valley of the Snake, where, beneath the lava crust, imprisoned streams, identical in source with the river above, were tunneling their way to daylight.

It was said that in certain places these subterranean waters gushed out from beneath the lava bluffs in fountains of white foam, bringing fertility to some chosen valley, located, perhaps, by a refugee Mormon with a keen patriarchal scent for pasture, or a road-weary plainsman who here unshipped his wagon-top, and turned loose his lean stock and his tribe of whiteheaded children. It was loosely ventured round the camp-fire that rich washings of fine gold might be gathered from the beds of these hid

the sluicings of ages had been collecting.

Alan's eyes grew big at these tales. He asked many questions; in particular why these exciting presumptions had never been put to the proof. He was told that, in all probability, until that region had been scientifically explored they were incapable of proof. The few doors which opened into that mysterious cellarage were dismal traps not easy to find; and those best acquainted with the country were shy of meddling with its secrets. The river itself had a sinister reputation. The Indians never trusted their naked bodies to its flood; no old plainsman could be induced to pull off his shirt and plunge into the Snake, nor would he suffer a "tenderfoot" to do so in his presence without earnest remonstrance and warning.

Another of the boys claimed to be the discoverer of a cave which he compared to a vast sunken jug. He had come upon it accidentally, riding as messenger from camp to camp; had stopped only long enough to drop a stone down the pit-dark hole, where all was silence and airless night. The depth, from the sound, had been something awesome. Later, with two comrades, he had searched for the "jug" over every foot of the bare plain where he had tried to locate it by memory. They had ridden from town equipped with ropes and candles; but not that day nor ever afterward had he found the lost entrance to the cave. It had relapsed into the mystery that broods over the desert, the silence which it keeps, though the ear of man is ever at its lips.

The trend of the Great Snake River plains is distinctly toward the west. That way the mountains open to welcome the warm winds from the coast, which temper the winters of all that inland region. As summer advances and drought encamps upon the land, the visiting winds are succeeded by local breezes which blow with the regularity of day and night. It is then the great air-currents, rising from the burning face of the desert, beckon to the mountain-winds, and as punctual as a sea-breeze they come whooping down at night through cañons and passes of the foot-hills. No sleeper, upon the ground or under heated house-roofs, but is grateful for these night-winds; no sunburned traveler, beneath the bright stars of the desert, but feels his strength renewed, bathed in that steady, balmy tide of coolness.

Alan rode out of camp after such a night of solid sleep, very different from the same night which his father had watched out in the cañon. It was the time of perfect equilibrium which comes twice in the twenty-four hours, once after sunrise and again about the setting of the sun. The silence of the desert was unbroken by bird or breeze or sound of footsteps, except

ing the steady clink and shuffle of Modoc's hoofs getting over the ground in excellent cayuse fashion. The little horse was at home; his ears were pricked forward, his eye keen for the trackless way he knew so well. He kept edging northward toward the pass between the low, black buttes, standing apart like gateposts to the mountains; between them lifted a far, aërial vision of the blue Owyhees, and the War Eagle, wearing his crest of snow. The face of the plain was featureless and wan. There is but one color to this desert landscape-sagegreen, slightly greener in spring, and grayer in summer, with a sifting of chrome dust. In winter it is most impressive under a light fall of snow, not heavy enough to hide the slight but significant configuration of the ground, yet white enough to throw into relief the strange markings of black lava, where it crops out, or lies scattered, or confronts the traveler in those low, flat-headed buttes, so human, so savage, in their lone outlines, keeping watch upon the encroachments of travel.

Alan had been in the saddle since seven o'clock, and it was now noon. He was looking about for a good spot where Modoc might pick a little grass while he ate his lunch. Nothing more quickly catches the eye in an uncivilized region than a bit of painted wood. Alan could not have passed by without seeing a broken wagon-tongue abandoned in the sage-brush; and this one had the peculiarity of a new rope cleverly knotted about the middle of it. The end of the rope disappeared in the ground. Alan stopped to investigate this mystery. To his inordinate delight he found that he was kneeling at the lip of one of those dry wellsperhaps the "jug" itself. No consideration known to the mind of a boy could have deterred him from attempting to go down. He took, however, a few simple precautions. He made fast his pony to a stout sage-stump. Modoc stood well as a rule, but his heart was traveling northward, and his legs might be tempted to follow. Alan then tried the rope; the knots held. The thought did strike him, with a slight chill, What has become of the man who tied those knots? He leaned his face above the hole and shouted; he would have been surprised indeed had he received an answer. He gathered stones and tried the depth by the sound of their fall. It was deep, but not so appallingly deep, and the bottom, from the sound, was perfectly dry. Of the shape or nature of the walls he could learn but little, because of their size and the smallness of the orifice. He pulled up the rope; it was, at a guess, a twenty-foot braided lariat, with a second longer rope spliced to the end of it: fifty feet, at the most, would cover the length of that swinging tether. He now collected a bundle of sage

sticks for torches, small ones to light quickly and larger ones to burn longer. These he tied together into a fagot, which he dropped down the hole. To provide against accident to the precious bundle he fastened a torch-stick to his belt. Matches he had with him, but he felt in his pocket to make sure. He took pride in these precautions, so sensible did they strike him, so experienced and businesslike. His heart beat with expectation great and vague. Modoc watched his master restively; but without a glance at his pony, or a farewell pat, Alan put both feet into the hole, and his head was soon below the roots of the sage-brush.

When he had lowered himself about ten feet, his body began to oscillate with a slow, irregular, sickening motion. He felt himself miserably detached. He struck out with his feet, hoping to touch the sides of the vault; but he had now reached the bilge, and kicking did but aggravate the spiral movement, which became more pronounced and confusing as the rope lengthened above him. In another moment his toes touched the bundle of torch-sticks, his stretched muscles subsided, and he stepped free upon the floor of the cave. When a momentary dizziness had passed he looked up and saw the light of day above his head—a small, white star which shed no rays, but rather increased by contrast the palpable effect of the darkness into which he had dropped as into another element.

He made haste to light his torch. The flame spluttered and flared; he looked about him, and saw, to his horror, that he was not alone in the cave. The man who tied the knots had been watching him from the moment his body had darkened the hole. Alan had seen Juan Pacheco the homicide only once, by moonlight, at long rifle-range; he knew not a feature of him, but he was certain that it was he, the yellow Mexican, crouched upon the floor of the cave pointing a Winchester in his face. Pacheco, if he it were, seemed to recognize his visitor. He smiled a cruel, half-breed smile, displaying a bad set of wrinkles around the corners of his mouth.

"Ven aca!" he commanded quietly. Alan moved away from the hole.

"How many more come?"

"No one," said Alan. "I am alone."

Pacheco looked as if he did not believe him. A moment passed in silence, Pacheco listening, Alan breathing quick and hard.

"Hold up the light! Mas arriba!"

Alan held up his torch in both hands as high as he could, and Pacheco went through his clothes, taking from him his pistol, his cartridgebelt, and his precious matches.

"Sst! What is that?"

Modoc, stamping on the hard-baked ground,

was calling to his master with a loud, cheerful a narrow incline which rose to the level of what whinny.

"It is my pony, poor brute; he wants me," Alan explained.

"It is a good brute. You have tied him? Bueno, muy bueno!"

Alan did not know then why Pacheco should have called it good; but afterward he knew. He explained how he had come upon the hole by chance on his way across the plains northward to the Summit, which he must reach before dark. Pacheco seemed to attend, but from his face Alan could gather nothing of the effect of his words.

"Miguel Salarsono-is he dead?" This was the man Pacheco had knifed. He was dead, but Alan hesitated at the truth, which Pacheco read in his eyes.

"Esta bien," he said coolly. "They want me. Where now Peter Kountze ?"

"In town when I saw him last." "What day you see him?" "Long time ago." Alan lied, thinking it would be bad for him should he confess to having met Kountze the day before.

Again Pacheco read his face. He gave a dissatisfied grunt. "Put out your light," said he. "It smokes," said Alan, "but it is better than no light."

"You are with one who knows his way," said Pacheco in Spanish. Alan barely understood him; but he thought to flatter Pacheco by seeming to know his language.

"I want to look around, now I'm down here. Rum place, ain't it?" he said, pretending to a cheerful curiosity he was far from feeling.

"You shall have plenty time." "And plenty light, too, I hope." Pacheco cut him short, roughly assisting him to put out his torch. He undid from about his waist a greasy silk sash, gave Alan one end of it, and kept the other himself. "Anda!" he commanded. "Por aqui," and he led on, Alan following at the girdle's length as best he could. Whether they were traversing a series of chambers connected by passages, or one long gallery of varying width and height, Alan could surmise only by the sound of their footsteps on the rock floor, which sometimes rang as between lofty walls and again fell dull and flat. He concluded presently that he was getting his underground eyesight, else the darkness was no longer absolute. Pacheco called a halt, and changed the order of march by putting Alan before him. The roof here descended to within a few feet of the floor. Alan could make out the shape of a low opening like the entrance to a drift, defined against a faint light beyond. They went down upon hands and knees, and crawled forward along

by contrast seemed a fair chamber; round, like a congealed bubble in the rock; not lighted, yet something less than dark, owing to a crack in the roof; deep, but narrow as a spear, through which a gleam of white daylight stole into the cell.

"I make you welcome, Señor Caballero, to this your house," said Pacheco, as they stood upright, in the dim oubliette, facing each other.

Alan struggled to be calm and to take the words, spoken in Spanish, as the language of compliment, at the worst as a grim joke befitting the place.

"Muchas gracias, señor," he responded, with a smile as wan as the imprisoned ray of daylight that touched his face. "It is a very good house. You are living here secreto, retirado, I understand. I can keep dark. It shall be all the same, I promise you." He spoke slowly, with extreme emphasis, that Pacheco might lose no word of his meaning. "I swear, it shall be all the same as if I had never seen you here. The cave shall be forgotten. Understand?"

"Si, si. All the same-after you get out." Pacheco grinned significantly, and Alan's heart turned over in his breast.

Beyond the cur-like upward glance of his covert eye and his occasional cruel smile, Pacheco's face relapsed into impassiveness. The man had been villainous by torchlight; he was ghastly now by the faint, white daylight, like one on whom the sun had not shone for months.

"How long-how long," Alan gasped, "have you been down here?"

"The light come fourteen time since the night I skip," said Pacheco, glancing upward at the crack in his dungeon roof. "Alone?"

"A mis solas."

"Why don't you clear out— - vamose? The country is big."

"It is very big, señor; and I have no horse."

"Where is your own horse?"

"He play out, three miles; he drop in the sage-brush. I am here very safe; by and by pretty hungry." He grinned and shrugged expressively. His philosophy of suffering promised as little pity for another as he wasted upon himself.

"Good God, man! does no one know you are here?"

[blocks in formation]

"Poco, poco tiempo. When it is dark, I go up. I give him water."

"But I've twenty-five miles to go before dark." Alan was shaking from head to foot.

"Sit down, hombrecito. Rest you'self. You have hunt me like jack-rabbit; now you have find me in my hole. What 's the matter with that?"

"God in heaven, Pacheco, my people will go mad!" the boy shouted, forgetting that no one would expect him that night or any night, that his absence was now a fact accepted by every one who knew him above ground. This last cold detail of his situation closed upon him like the silence that follows the echo of a dungeon door. He flung himself upon the Mexican with a captive's madness, throwing away every hope of pity, and grappling with him as his open enemy.

Pacheco carried a knife concealed at the back of his neck with which he might have finished the encounter, but murder was no part of his present intention toward his prisoner. He closed with the lad, hugging him in his arms, and the pair rocked to and fro and staggered about the dim place till Alan was thrown, dragging Pacheco with him, the back of Alan's head striking the floor of the cave with a sickening dunt. Pacheco freed himself, and Alan lay still.

X.

DAYLIGHT had faded from the crevice when Alan came to himself. The cave was perfectly dark. He started up on his elbow, but fell back, giddy and sick and sore. It was some moments before he could summon courage to test the silence. No answer came to his first hoarse call; yet Pacheco might be in the outer cave. He called again, and listened, holding his breath, and hearing nothing but his heart beating like a clock. He shouted, he screamed, he sobbed, as a child awakened by a frightful dream that cannot make itself heard.

He lay all night at the mercy of hideous doubts and speculations which only the morning could set at rest. Had Pacheco gone? Had he left the rope? His flesh rose in chills, and again he burned and stifled with the torture of these questions. In his tossings on the floor of the cave his hand had struck against a pail heavy with a delicious weight of ice-cold water. He had splashed it over himself in his eagerness, dragging it toward him. In the morning he made a terrible discovery. All Pacheco's little store of food and candle had been set forth in plain sight for his successor's use; but the matches were ruined. Alan had drenched them in his transport of drinking in the night. For a moment he gave way again,

clasping his head, and sobbing, and rolling

about on the floor.

He felt sick and bruised, and silly with weak

ness.

His eyes ached, his throat and jaws were sore, his hair incrusted with blood from the cut on his scalp; but no bones were broken, and he knew that food would strengthen his heart. As he crawled about, gathering materials for a breakfast, he made a new and momentous discovery. Pacheco had left him a letter, of explanation, perhaps, or direction. But when Alan came to examine this sole link between him and the living, he found he could not decipher it. He had persuaded Pacheco too well of his linguistic acquirements; the letter was in Spanish, mongrel Spanish, brutally ill-written with a pencil on a bit of greasy, wrinkled paper bag which had refused to take the marks distinctly. Alan could have crushed, torn it; he could have killed Pacheco for inventing this new torture. He groaned, and put it away, and struggled to swallow some food, for a greater test of his nerve was before him. If Pacheco had left the way of escape open, why had he written a letter?

He had been led into the cell by the righthand wall; he took the left going back. One hand he kept upon the rock, groping and shuffling forward, past angles and turns which he remembered, till he entered the great chamber with its one far bright star of blessed daylight set in the blackness of its roof. One instant he hung back; he dared not look: the next, suspense was past-the rope was gone.

All that day he sat in the twilight of the inner cell and pored over the letter. Sweat broke out upon his flesh, the agony of attention balked his memory, and his mind refused to act. The few words that he could read held aloof in maddening incoherency from those that were dark to him: "water-the white cross-the great cave-twenty days"-then something about mi amiga; the noun was feminine. And then the writer signed himself—“with the cheek of the devil!" groaned Alan, surveying the ghastly words of compliment to a doomed man

[blocks in formation]

All day he hammered his brain over this diabolical message, and when he could see no longer he sat in darkness, and its goblin characters came out on the strained wall of vision and tortured him with guesses. He fell asleep repeating the words that led his mind a weary dance far into the night: the white cross-water. Twenty days, twenty days, twenty days.

Three times the light faded from the crack and came again, and, sleeping or waking, the word water had become the unceasing pang that

haunted his consciousness. He had counted his stock of food, and of candles, which were nothing without matches, yet might serve as food should he come to a rat-like desperation in the last stage of hunger; but he knew he should not starve to death. Every day while the wan light lasted he ranged round the walls of his cell; searching crannies and crevices and spots of shadow, listening, sounding for hollow places, stamping, and sometimes breaking out and howling like a trapped animal, all in an awful, breezeless silence, never altering from hour to hour, from day to day. By drinking sparely at night and morning only, he made his precious pail last a week. On the eighth day he ate little, fearing to increase the desire for water, which had taken already the form of a nervous demand. The food which remained to him was of a thirst-provoking quality-a sack of moldy pilot-bread, some pounds of dried salt beef, several cans of cooked beans, a few dusty, gritty raisins in a paper bag. He had heard that small, smooth pebbles held in the mouth promote moisture, and occupy the mind of one suffering from thirst. On the ninth day he collected such pebbles as he could find and tried the effect of them, but without much enthusiasm for the result.

On the tenth day he made a joyful discovery. A greasy waistcoat of Pacheco's lay bundled in one corner of the cell near his bunk; Alan had never touched it; it had for him that personal association which made the sight of it repulsive. But this morning he took it up and examined the pockets in the sudden hope that he might find a stray match or two left by chance; and he was not disappointed. He found a good bunch of California matches united on one thick stem, which had worked through a hole in the waistcoat side-pocket, and lay concealed between the stuff and the lining. That day he explored the dark passage by candle-light. His tongue was so swollen that he could no longer swallow food. He had fever, and could sleep but little, and then was beset by morbid dreams. His strength was fast going. On the eleventh day he dragged himself into the outer cavern, wondering at his fatal mistake of wasting a whole day in the passage when the letter had named only the caverna grande. His legs would not bear him up to make the round of the vast walls; but he sat himself down on the floor, and lighted all his candles, placing them a little way off on the floor in sockets of drip, that he might get their combined effect without the shock of it in his eyes, which were tender to the light.

His face was as white as the candles, his blood-shot eyes were sunken and wild. He had picked at a roughness on the side of one of his fingers till the place was raw; he was

picking at it now as he stared before him. He had a crazed, broken sensation in his head; his mind labored and drifted heavily. He thought his senses must be going when, on a space of wall above him, where the light struck upward at a new angle, appeared a sign chalked upon the rock in the form of a cross. Trembling he looked away at the reality about him, at the place of his living burial, and then fixed his. eyes once more upon the spot where the cross had appeared. It was still there. And below, at the meeting of the wall with the floor of the cave, there rested an immovable spot of blackness. He shifted his lights; the shadow did not move. It was the opening of a passage or burrow beneath the rock. Hands. perhaps as weak as his had scooped it; and some doomed captive as desperate as himself had marked the spot with the symbol of suffering and of mercy in memory of his release from torment.

He crawled into the hole, keeping a lighted candle before him; only his panting breath stirred the flame in that lifeless air. Creeping forward on his elbows, guarding always his light, its soft ray fell upon a dark, sunken pool; on the brink of which he fell on his face and lapped like one of Gideon's three hundred.

The agony was over. Imprudence followed, and all the train of effects resulting from the nervous shock his system had suffered. He gained no strength; he lost, indeed, from day to day; and the twentieth day was at hand. He had made himself a calendar of matchsticks, which he dropped, one each time the light came and went, into an empty tin can, which thus became the repository of his great hope and his greater dread. When the matchsticks numbered nineteen, Alan laid himself down beneath the hole in the outer chamber, resolved to lie there till rescue came or death. On the back of Pacheco's letter he had scrawled a few words to his father, in case deliverance should come too late. Having eased himself of this last message, with a pail of water near, and such food as he could retain out of the little remaining of his poor stock, he lay and watched out the twentieth day and the night that followed, not daring to sleep. Another day passed, and the light faded from the hole, and he prayed that he might go before the morning watch, for the suspense was worse than death. He closed his eyes and went incontinently to sleep. The angels might waken him if help should come; he could watch no longer.

In the night a voice called him from above; it became part of his dreams, and turned them into nightmare; the call was repeated again and again, but he did not wake.

a

Then, with a prayer to Mary of the Mercies, girl, kneeling by the hole, bound her long

« AnkstesnisTęsti »