Unexplored! Part 12

"To stone?"

"By the removal of their own tissues and replacement by mineral matter. A fossil may be merely the print of a leaf of some prehistoric plant on sandstone, or the footprint of some antediluvian reptile. In the National Museum they have a cast of a prehistoric shad that shows the imprint of every bone and fin ray."

"How on earth could that have been formed?" marveled Ted.

"Why, it was simply buried in fine mud, which first protects it from the air, (and consequent immediate decay), then gradually fills every pore of every bone, till by the time the mud has turned to stone, the bones are ossified. Of course the animal matter has all dissolved away by this time. Now if this mud that filled the pores happened to be silica, (a sandy formation), it is possible to eat the surrounding limestone away with acids and uncover the silica formation, see, old kid?"

"Aw, that stuff makes my head ache," protested Tim. "If I see any ossified bones lying around, or even a footprint or leaf print in the stone, I'll know I've found a fossil. But I thought we were chasing fire-bugs."

"The impatience of youth!" Ace playfully squelched him, from the vantage point of his slight seniority.

"What does the Bible say," laughed the Ranger, "about truth from the mouths of babes?" And he arose a bit stiffly,--for he had had a strenuous time of it the past few days, and the cave damp had set his tired limbs to aching.

For upwards of an hour they followed dark and winding pa.s.sageways, (rats and lizards and occasional colonies of bats fleeing before them), naturally without the slightest sign of the fugitives, when they came to another grotto, the loveliest they had yet seen. It might have been a fairy cavern, aglitter with pure crystal. The carved prisms shone dazzlingly in the light of the carbide lamp, and the boys stuffed their pockets with some of the jewel-like bits that had fallen to the floor.

From this they presently entered into what seemed like a Gothic cathedral, with a dome whose highest point must have been several hundred feet above. The boys were fairly awed by its beauty, while the Ranger's eyes gleamed appreciatively. On the walls were what might have been carvings of flowers and lacework, creamy to smoke color, gypsum, Ace told them.

"Are these fossils?" demanded Ted excitedly.

"I should say not, you poor fish!--You ichthyosaurus," laughed Ace teasingly.

"You what?" asked the Ranger.

"That means ancient fish."

"All right," grinned Ted. "If I'm an ich----"

"Ich-thy-o-saur-us?" Radcliffe came to his rescue.

"Then you're a dinosaur," grinned Ted.

"Here, here, stop calling each other names!" commanded Radcliffe. "And perhaps Ace will tell us about this gypsum formation."

"Thunder! Wish Norris was here! I tell you I'm no professor. But if you're after fossils, don't you remember what he told us, that day just before we lost the pack burro?--That in this part of California we have rock from the Cambrian era a mile thick, and I'll bet it's full of fossils of the fish age!"

"Well," Radcliffe briskly interposed, as they came to another turn, "we'll never find those Mexicans unless we separate and hunt faster than we've been doing. Are you fellows game for taking one way while I go back to that last turn and try the left hand pa.s.sageway? Of course the instant you get wind of them, report back to me." They signified their gameness by picking a precarious footing, (Ted first), along the slippery floor, their candles thrust in their hat bands.

Above they came to another but a smaller forest of alabaster stalact.i.tes, shining like icicles or mosses, some white as snow, some yellow as gold, and some so like maple sugar in appearance that Ace actually tasted it.

In one place there was a bit of what Ace said was needle gypsum, that hung as fine as fur.

Radcliffe, retracing his steps, (with the aid of the twine ball), till he came to the cross roads, as it were, turned to the left and forged ahead with his carbide lamp, treading softly as a cougar, with revolver c.o.c.ked in his right hand. Ever and anon he stopped breath-still to listen.

Pa.s.sing through the same alabaster cavern that had so impressed the Spanish boy, his eye caught the bandanna Pedro had dropped in the left-hand pa.s.sageway. With an inward exclamation, he hurried on till he had reached the end of the blind. Stooping with his lamp, he could see the fresh scratches their feet had made. Darting back to the turn of the tunnel, where he had picked up the bandanna, he took the only choice left to him, the right hand way, with all the satisfaction of a hound on the scent. More scratches on the sandstone floor a.s.sured him that they had really gone this way, instead of turning back the way they had come, and presently he too was standing in the gallery of the sloping floor and yellowed pillars, at whose far end the dripstone cataract hung, turned to soundless stone. But of the three Mexicans and Pedro there was no trace.

"I say, when do we eat?" Ace was just beginning, when the floor suddenly gave way beneath him, and he fell down a ten foot well, landing on all fours, in Stygian blackness. And no sooner had his bulk padded the stone beneath than Ted came, plunk! almost on top of him.

At the moment both were slightly stunned. Their candle flames had of course been flicked out. Then Ted reached mechanically for his matches, by whose flare he found his hat, and still firmly stuffed into the band, his candles. The light disclosed a cavern with muddy walls dripping above them, and to their right, an inky pool of water. The air was all aflutter with the bats they had startled from their pendant slumbers, lizards scuttled away in all directions, and a fish flopped in the pool, with a splash that sounded out of all proportion to its exciting cause. Ted grinned as he saw Ace first pinch himself to see if he were dreaming, then slowly feel his joints to make sure none were seriously damaged.

The fall had rather jolted his nerves, but otherwise he was unhurt, as was his chum. But how to return the way they had come they could not see, for the walls were too slippery to climb, there was not a spear of anything movable in sight on which they might gain a foothold, and when Ted tried it from Ace's shoulders, the rim of the well was too slippery with mud for him to gain a hand-hold.

The bats, blind from their lightless lives, b.u.mped against them and added the final touch of weirdness by their gnome-like faces.

With the uncanny feeling that they ought to whisper, the shaking boys started to explore the cavern, which they found led off in three directions. It must be on the same level they had left when they said good-by to Radcliffe, but in their panic they were completely turned around, and they had not explored for ten minutes before they were so confused that they could not even have found their way back to the cavern of the pool.

Now Ted had been lost before. He knew the panic feeling, the sudden sense of utter and helpless isolation, the absurd fearfulness, almost the temporary insanity of it. His scalp p.r.i.c.kled,--as did Ace's,--and for a little while his wits seemed befogged. Then he remembered that bed-rock advice Long Lester had once given him. When you don't know which way to go, sit down and don't move one step for half an hour. And try to think out the way you got there, or some plan of campaign for finding yourself again.

Ted had once been lost in the chaparral,--a th.o.r.n.y tangle of low growths that reached higher than his head. When he first discovered he was off the trail, he wandered about as in a mystic maze, till a shred of his own gingham shirt, (caught on a stub of manzanita), told him he had circled.

He had had to spend the night there, but in the end he had stumbled upon the trail again, not ten feet from where he lost it.

As Long Lester afterwards pointed out, had he but blazed his trail from the very first step, he could at least have back-tracked. Or better, if he had with his jack-knife made a blaze sufficiently high on some stunted tree to have seen it and come back to it, he might have circled, and in ever widening circles would surely, in time, have found the trail.

Or, again, he might have--had he known--at least hacked a straight course by the stars, (always provided that he knew in which direction lay the way out).

"Ace," he managed to steady his voice when they had been seated on a dry ledge for some little time, "your knowledge of cave formations might help us to find the way out of here. Gee! If this was only in the woods, or even on some mountain side above the clouds! But it's up to you now."

"Well," Ace began, "the map of the typical cave, say like Mammoth, wiggles around a little like a river with its tributaries, though nothing like so regularly, with here and there a wider place, and----"

"Here and there," contributed his chum, "a well to a lower level."

"Yes. You see, the water that wears a cave out of the softer layers of rock seeps in along the fissures of the surface rock, and at first they make subterranean rivers. Where you find these big springs in the hillsides, they may be the outlets of these underground waterways."

"I get that, all right," said Ted.

"Well, then, sometimes these Stygian streams----"

"Keep it up, Professor!" Ted clapped him on the shoulder.

"Huh!--These rivers wear away the soft limestone layer,--if it is this kind of a cave,--'till they come to the harder sandstone. Then the first chance they find to get through the sandstone,--perhaps through a crack made by an earthquake or something,--they go down and wear away a deeper level. Mammoth Cave is on five levels. That leaves the upper galleries dry. Now the one we were on was dry except for the moisture that is always seeping into a cave, but I suspect now we're on a level with the river, it's so muddy, and we'll find it somewhere."

"Then we'll find it somewhere!" brightened Ted. "And we can follow it.

That's the plan of action!" and he jumped to his feet.

"We'll follow it if we can. Thunder! I wish we had a boat."

"So long as you're wishing, why don't you wish for a fat steak with onions?"

"It has been some time since we ate." Ace tightened his belt. "Must be getting late in the day! Let's run!" And run they did, till they began slipping on a muddy slope.

They had to place each foot with care now, and their progress was slow.

At the same time their candles were nearly gone. "Now let's put out all but one," suggested Ted. "Just burn one at a time. What _would_ we do without any light?" But Ace did not know the answer.

What of Pedro, meantime? At that particular instant he had just tried to make his get-away, with the result that three drawn daggers were being flourished threateningly and most unhealthily near his heart. He had overheard enough evidence to convict all three of the Mexicans, thanks to his knowledge of the parent language, but as the desperadoes pushed farther and farther into the labyrinth, he gathered that they would come out a good safe distance from where they had entered,--probably on the other side of the ridge. Had he known the Ranger's whereabouts at that precise moment, he would have felt very differently.

Radcliffe, meantime, was staring into the dark recess of the cavern, but all he could see was the two shining eyes of whatever occupant was there.

Was it bear or cougar? For both, he knew, took refuge in caves. The largeness of the eyes inclined him to the belief that it was a California mountain lion, and such it was part of his work to exterminate,--though the state also hires an official lion hunter.

That the great cats are cowards he well knew. But this one was cornered, and might prove no mean antagonist. With revolver c.o.c.ked in his right hand, his lamp in the other, he advanced toward those two shining fires.

A faint scratching along the rocky floor warned him that the animal was gathering for a spring. He was still rather far for a revolver shot, but he aimed straight between the eyes. His shot reverberated with a thousand echoes. The sounds, ear-splitting in the smoke-filled gloom,--thundered like a thousand siege guns, it seemed to Radcliffe, stalact.i.tes tumbled about his ears like crockery, and more appalling than all the rest was the weird, almost human scream of the wounded animal, which likewise reechoed for several minutes. The unwitting cause of all this turmoil was in a cold perspiration when things finally quieted down.