A DROP IN THE DARK.
"Hark!"
It was Jack who uttered the exclamation.
The shouts were growing louder. Evidently the Mexicans had kept a
closer watch than he or Pete had imagined, and had quickly taken alarm
at the prolonged absence of their companion.
The boy could hear them battering the oak door of the cell they had so
recently occupied.
"Let 'em batter away," muttered Pete. "I shot the bolt on the inside."
To his amazement, Jack actually heard his companion chuckle. What could
the cow-puncher be made of, steel or granite, or a combination of both!
And now Pete began to wriggle along the ledge, pressing with all his
weight against the wall.
"Come on," he breathed to Jack, "throw all your weight inward and don't
look up or down."
In mortal fear of finding his body hurtling backward into vacancy at
any moment, the boy followed the intrepid cow-puncher along the narrow
footpath. Perhaps it needed more pluck on his part to proceed along the
insecure ledge in the pitchy blackness than it did on the part of the
nervy cow-puncher. Who shall take the exact measure of courage?
At last they reached the angle of the tower, and Pete stood still. To
proceed round the sharp angle, on no wider pathway than that which they
trod, would be manifestly impossible. Yet go on they must. Suddenly
Pete gave a cry of joy. Looking down into the darkness, he had seen,
not more than ten feet beneath them, the sharp ridge of an addition
to the old Mission church. If they could reach that he knew, from
calculating the height of the tower, they would not be far from the
ground.
Behind them the yells and shouts were growing louder.
To think, with Pete, was to act. With a muttered prayer, one of the
few he had ever uttered in his rough life, the cow-puncher crouched as
well as he could on the ledge. Putting over first one leg and then the
other, he deliberately dropped downward, till his hands gripped the
edge of the ledge on which a second before he had stood. His muscles
cracked as the sudden strain came on them, but he held fast, and a
second later let go. He landed to his intense joy, on a rough tiled
roof, after an easy drop of not more than four feet.
"Come on," he breathed upward to Jack, who had watched the
cow-puncher's daring act with horrified eyes.
"I--I can't," shivered the boy, who, plucky as he was, dreaded the idea
of a drop into the dark. "You go on, Pete, and leave me."
"Not much I won't. You make that drop, or I'll give you the biggest
hiding you ever had, Jack Merrill, when I get hold of you."
The cowboy had hit on just the words to bring Jack to the proper pitch
to take the leap.
"You ain't scared, are you?" whispered up Pete, determined to brace
the boy up in the way he knew would prove most effective.
Just as Pete had done a few moments previously, Jack, without a word,
knelt for one awful second on the brink of space and then gingerly
put over first one leg and then the other. Then followed the same
terrible rush into blackness that Pete had experienced, and the same
soul-sickening jolt and heart-leap as his fingers gripped, and he hung
safe.
"Drop!" snapped Pete.
Jack's fingers obediently unclasped their desperate grip, and he shot
downward to be caught in Pete's arms.
"Not so bad when you get used to it," whispered the cow-puncher. "Now
then, slide down."
"Slide down--where?"
"This rope. While you were getting ready up there"--even in the dark
Jack felt his cheeks flush--"while you were getting ready up there, I
fastened that greaser's rope to this old water-spout. All you got to do
is to slide down."
A second later Jack flashed down the side of the old church to the
ground, where, almost as soon as he had landed, Coyote Pete joined him.
"What now?" asked Jack amazedly. He had never dreamed when they stood
on that dizzy tower that in less than ten minutes they would be on firm
ground. Nor did he forget how much of the so-far successful escape was
due to Coyote Pete's skill and resourcefulness. But the hardest and
most dangerous part was yet to come.
Already the whole of the old church was aglow with lights, flashing
hither and thither, and outside, shout answered shout from a dozen
points of the compass.
"We'll run in the direction where there is the least racket," wisely
decided Pete.
"Crouch as low as you can, Jack," he ordered, as, doubled almost in
half, he darted off into the darkness.
Imitating his guide as best he could, Jack followed, but as ill-luck
would have it, their way led past an old well. In the pitch blackness
the boy did not avoid what Pete seemed to have steered clear of by
instinct. With a crash that woke the echoes, he blundered headlong into
a big pile of tin buckets and pails which had been placed there that
day. A bull running amuck in a tin shop could hardly have made more
noise.
"My great aunt alkali, you've done it now!" growled Pete, as the
terrific crash sounded close behind him.
"Oh, go on, Pete! Go on, and leave me," cried Jack miserably. "I'll
only hamper you. Go on by yourself."
"I'll go with you or not at all," was Pete's firm rejoinder. "Come on,
now, hurry. They're bound to have heard that, and they'll be 'round
here like so many hornets in a minute."
Pete's prophecy proved correct. Hardly had the clanging, clashing
echoes of the avalanche of dislodged tinware died out, before they
heard Black Ramon's voice shouting:
"Over there! Over there by the well. Fire at them."
Jack did not know much Spanish, but he could comprehend this.
"Fire away," muttered Pete grimly, as they rapidly wormed their way
along among the scrub. "You'll not do us any harm by shooting at the
well, but you'll drill your rotten tinware full of holes."
But the Mexicans having now recovered from their first excitement,
turned their thoughts to other ways of getting back the fugitives than
by firing into the darkness after them. To the ears of Jack and Pete
was soon borne the trample of horses, and the rattle of galloping
hoofs, as Black Ramon's men spread out through the darkness looking for
them.
"They're going to form a ring," he whispered, as they squirmed their
way along; "that's what they're going to do. They know we are without
horses or weapons, and that if they only make the ring large enough
they're bound to get us."
On and on they crept, so close to the ground that the burning dust,
which had a plentiful ad-mixture of alkali in it, filled their eyes and
nose. Pete was more or less used to the stuff, having ridden sometimes
for days at a time in it behind herds of cattle or horses, but to Jack
the smarting sensation in mouth and nostrils was almost unbearable. The
stuff fairly choked him.
Suddenly Pete's hand shot out and gripped Jack's arm with a viselike
pressure. Jack interpreted the signal without a word.
"Stop!"
Down they both crouched in the alkali dust among the brush, hardly
daring to breathe.
Long before Jack's ears had caught a sound, Pete's quick eye had
detected something. He laid his ear to the ground.
"Too dry," he muttered, after holding it there an instant.
Then he drew from his pocket his knife and opened both blades. The
larger he thrust into the earth and placed his ear against the smaller
bit of steel.
"Just as I thought. Coming this way!" he muttered. "We'll have to lie
low and trust to luck."
Presently the trampling that the cowboy's rough-and-ready telegraph had
detected became distinctly audible, and against the star-spattered sky
Jack saw two black figures on horseback slowly rise up from a hollow.
They came into view as slowly as fairies rising to the stage from a
trap-door in a theatre.
Neither Pete nor Jack dared to breathe, as the two figures appeared and
paused as if undecided which way to go. Suddenly one of them began to
speak.
"No sign of 'em in here, amigo. Say ombre, I tell you what--you ride
off to the right, and I'll take the left trail. We've covered all the
other ground, and that way we're bound to get 'em."
The Mexican grunted something and rode off in the direction the other
had indicated.
"It's Jim Cummings, the dern skunk," whispered Coyote Pete to Jack, his
indignation at the idea of being hunted by the renegade cowboy getting
the better of his prudence.
For one terrible minute Jack thought they had been discovered. Jim
Cummings, who had been riding off, stopped his pony abruptly and faced
round in the saddle.
"Queer," he said to himself; "thought I heard something. Guess I'll
take a look and see if the critters left any trail through hereabouts.
I wouldn't trust myself alone with Coyote Pete, but I know he's got no
shooting iron, and I reckon this will fetch down a dozen like him, or
the kid with him."
He patted his revolver--a big forty-four--as he spoke, and dismounted.
Throwing his pony's reins over his head, in plainsman's fashion, the
renegade struck a match and bent down toward the ground. He was looking
to see if Jack or Coyote Pete had passed that way.
What happened then came so quickly that afterward, when he tried to
tell it, Jack never could get the successive incidents arranged clearly
in his own mind. All that was audible was a frightened gasp from the
renegade as the glare of a match fell on Coyote Pete's face. Wet with
sweat, plastered with dust, and disfigured by righteous anger at the
renegade, Pete's countenance was indeed one to inspire terror in the
person suddenly lighting upon it.
Before the gasp had died out of Jim cummings' throat, and before he
could utter the cry that somehow refused to come, Coyote Pete, with
a spring like that of a maddened cougar, was on him, and bore him
earthward with a mighty crash.
"Take that, you coward, you sneak, you traitor!" he snarled
vindictively under his breath, as the unfortunate Jim Cummings
struggled and his breath came in sharp wheezes. As he spoke, Coyote
Pete, temporarily transformed by rage and scorn to a wild beast,
savagely hammered Jim Cummings' head against the ground.
He was recalled to himself by Jack, who, after his first moment of
startled surprise, realized that unless he interfered Cummings would in
all likelihood be killed.
"Pete, Pete, are you mad?" he gasped, seizing the other's arm and
staying it, as the furious cow-puncher was about to bring it crashing
down into the renegade's face.
"Mad!" repeated Pete, looking up, "well, I guess so. But I'm glad you
brought me to my senses, son. I'd hate to have the blood of such a
varmint as this on my conscience."
He rose to his feet, still breathing heavily from his furious outburst.
"Phew! but that did me good," he said, rolling the unconscious Cummings
over with a contemptuous foot. "I reckon this coyote won't go hunting
his own people with a pack of yellow dogs for a long time to come."
Pete was right, it was many a day before Cummings got over his
thrashing, but in the meantime the delay occasioned by Pete's outbreak
came near to costing them dear.
A sudden trampling in the darkness behind them made them turn, and
they saw dimly the figure of a horseman behind them. The starlight
glinted on his rifle barrel as he aimed it at them and covered both the
fugitives beyond hope of escape.
"Up your hands!"
The command came from the new arrival in broken, but none the less
vigorous and unmistakable English.