Unexplored! Part 13

But the puma, (for such it proved to be), lay dead at his feet.

The three Mexicans likewise heard the racket, for they, as it happened, were not far away. The Ranger had very nearly trailed them. With rolling eyes and hands that mechanically traced the sign of the cross, they listened, while the thunders died away.

Pedro, though his nerves were more than a little shaken, was quick to seize his opportunity. Slipping like an eel through a narrow opening between two columns, where the dripstone had all but closed the way into another chamber, he would have escaped observation entirely had it not been for his betraying torch-light.

Sanchez darted after him. But remember, Sanchez was at least a hundred pounds heavier than even well-fed Pedro. The result might have been expected. He stuck mid-way! And there he dangled his fat legs in an endeavor to free himself, while Pedro doubled with laughter and the other Mexicans stared, too amazed to move.

"Pull, can't you, pull!" was Pedro's expurgated version of Sanchez's reiterated discourse with his followers. And when no one came to his rescue, he nearly burst a blood vessel in his helpless wrath.

Pedro, feeling safe from pursuit, with such a plug in the only approach to his sanctuary, now for the first time disclosed his knowledge of Mexican. Sanchez's astonishment was as huge as his att.i.tude was undignified, and if words could have seared, Pedro would have been well scorched. But the boy only told him of an item he had read in the paper, where a fat man got stuck in a cave and had to fast for three days before his girth had diminished sufficiently that he could be extricated.

With that, Pedro bade them a fond farewell, and departed along a labyrinthian way they could not follow. That some one was on their trail he suspected from the revolver shot, and the fire bugs would be nicely trapped.

Now the Ranger reasoned that the lion's den would not be far from the outer world, and in that he was right, as he proved by following it to its end. The last lap of the way he had to wriggle along on hands and knees, but he could see the glow of the setting sun in a circle of light at the end, and in a very few minutes he had poked his head and shoulders beneath an overhanging bowlder on a rock ledge. It was the Southern slope of the spur, and after a little reconnoitering he discovered that it was the self-same spur on which fire-fighting headquarters had been established. The cave, then, pierced clear through the ridge, and he had been exactly all day in following its windings.

Hiking wearily up the slope to the ridge, he could see the glow of the cook-fire perhaps a mile away, while down in the canyon on the other side the fire still glowed in red embers where it continued to devour the blackened tree trunks, though it was under far better control than it had been the day before.

Rosa's solicitude at his haggard face and tattered, mud stained clothing restored him wonderfully. (After all, there were compensations in the scheme of things.)

"We were just about to start a search party in there," said Norris. "I would have before, if it hadn't been for the fire. But where are the boys?" He paled in alarm.

"I don't know," Radcliffe dragged from white lips.

"Oh!" gasped Rosa, her eyes filling with tears which she promptly hid by turning her back.

Without a word Long Lester gathered up the paraphernalia the Ranger now saw he had stacked and ready on the ground, and fitted it into a back-pack. There was food, rope, and candles, another tube of carbide for Radcliffe's lamp, a box of matches in a tight lidded tin, and even a short length of rustic ladder made for the occasion.

Norris shouldered part of it as by previous agreement.

Radcliffe explained the diagram he tore from his note-book, marking a black cross at the point where he had left the boys.

"I dunno," said the old prospector, "but what we might as well go in one way as another. I reckon we can folly this yere map backwards as well as forrud, and we'll just hike down and go in the way you kem out."

"That's a go," agreed Norris, striding after him.

"Oh," yelled the Ranger after them. "Come back! I'll deputize you both.

Here, Norris," and he gave the younger man his revolver and cartridge belt, with his official p.r.o.nouncement.

"I swan!" said Long Lester. "Here I were a-thinkin' so much about them boys I clean forgot the Mexicans," and he slung his rifle atop his pack.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SNOW-SLIDE

"I'm glad they got in a few hours' sleep this noon," solicitized Rosa, placing homemade bread and coffee before the Ranger, then dipping up a bowl of soup. She looked f.a.gged to death herself, and Radcliffe made her promise to roll up in a blanket on a browse bed.

"Oh, if only it would rain!" she sighed, "and put out the fire!"

"Sure wish it would!" he agreed. "Haven't had such a big one in years."

"The DeHaviland was back with more supplies," one of the men reported.

"It sure takes tons of grub to keep these firemen stoked," sighed Rosa drowsily from her blankets. "But they work like lumbermen, and I'd give every last man here a medal if I could."

Norris and Long Lester skirted the South slope its whole length without finding the cave mouth from which Norris had exited. But by now it was dark, and the task doubly difficult. "If it wasn't for them boys being most likely just plumb panicky from being lost," said the old man, "I'd call it sense to camp for the night. Once it's sun-up, we'll find the place easy enough."

But Norris was too uneasy to leave any stone unturned. What might not have happened in the hours since he had last seen his charges! His imagination, given free rein, pictured everything from murder to raving mania.

As they neared the head of the gulch, they could see, on the side of the main ridge that towered above them, patches of snow that gleamed white in the star-light. The canyon here headed sharply to the left.

The side they were on, the short side of the turn, was becoming impa.s.sable with rough bowlders and tangling underbrush.

Of a sudden a low rumbling sounded faintly from seemingly beneath their feet. The ground wavered dizzily. Trees swayed, rocks started rolling down the canyon side, and the very bowlder they were on tilted till they had to make a quick leap for it. It was just one of the slight earthquake shocks to which all Californians are accustomed. But never before had either Norris or Long Lester been on such dangerous footing when one happened.

Quick as thought, the old man went leaping up over the bowlders, yelling frantically to Norris to follow him. The geologist knew in a theoretical way what to do when a snow-slide threatened, and with that lightning speed with which our minds work in an emergency he had seen that the shock of the 'quake would precipitate snow-slides, and that they were directly in the path of one.

He knew theoretically,--as the old prospector knew from observation of several tragedies,--that the river of snow and rock-slide would flood down canyon till it came to a turn, then hurtle off in fine spray--on the side of the curve! (It all happened in an instant.) Their one salvation lay in taking the _short_ side of the curve,--though the going was rougher.

With the roar of an express train,--whose speed it emulated,--the oncoming slide tore down at them. Down 3,000 feet of canyon the crusted snows of what was still spring at that alt.i.tude rushed like a river at flood. The wind of its coming swayed tall trees.

The two men escaped by the skin of their teeth!

"It sh.o.r.e would'a scrambled us up somethin' turrible!" the old man kept exclaiming.

Next day, he knew, they would find a clean swath cut down the mountainside,--tall pines swept away, root and branch. He had seen many of these scars, which in later years had become a garden of fire-weed and wild onion, a paradise for birds and squirrels and onion loving bears.

He had seen steep mountains fairly striped by the paths of slides, the forest still growing between stripes. For the steeper the slope, the swifter the slide, as might be expected.

Lucky for them this had been a Southwest slope; for on the North, away from the sun, a slide is even swifter!

He had seen one man buried by crossing the head of a slide which gave way under his foot. Its roar had been heard for miles. Frost-cracked from the solid granite, the side rock that accompanied it had been weathered from the peak. Thus are high mountains worn away.

For perhaps an hour after the near-catastrophe, the air was filled with blinding snow,--not that from the skies, but that of the snow dust raised by the slide.

The circle of the rising moon threw a silver glamor over the scene. "What do you figure makes these 'quakes, anyway?" asked Long Lester.

"The boys have asked that too, and I can't give it to you all in a breath. But I'll give you the story before we end this trip."

At the moment of the earthquake, Ace and Ted, immured on a lower level of the cave, were following a subterranean river. They got well splashed by the waves set up, and worse scared, but it was all over in a minute and they were only a degree more uncomfortably damp than they had been before. Suddenly Ted gave an exclamation. A crag of drip-rock had been shaken from the roof, and there, imbedded in the limestone, lay the plain footprint of--it might have been a giant!

The boys stared, marveling a moment, then Ted voiced his guess. The fossil of some giant of prehistoric ages! "A fossil, all right," Ace agreed. "But that isn't a human footprint, even if there had been men that size. That was made by some animal! If we ever get out of here, let's bring Norris and come back with picks and find out."

"Then I can quarry this fossil out and sell it?" ventured Ted.

"Right-o!" with a congratulatory slap that made Ted wince.