_The Light in the Crater_
"Of course it wasn't blood!" said Smithy explosively. "But try to tell
the men that. See how far you get. 'Devils!' That's been their talk
since yesterday when Riley got smeared up--and now that the bailer's
gone we can't prove a thing."
Again he was pacing restlessly back and forth in the little board
shack that was Rawson's field head-quarters. Rawson, seated by the
window, was looking at tables of comparative melting points. He
glanced up sharply.
"You haven't found it yet?" he questioned. "A forty-foot bailer! Now
that's a nice easy little thing to mislay."
Riley had followed the excited Smithy into the room; he stood silently
by the door until he caught Rawson's questioning glance.
"Forty feet or forty inches," he said, "'tis gone! 'Twas there by the
derrick last night, and this marnin'--"
"That's fine," Rawson interrupted with heavy sarcasm. "I haven't
enough down below ground to keep my mind occupied--I need a few
mysteries up top. Now do you really expect me to believe that a thing
like that bailer has been carried off?"
This time it was Smithy who interrupted. "You can just practise
believing on that, Dean," he said. "When you get so you can believe a
forty-foot bailer can vanish into thin air, then you'll be ready for
what I've got. This is what I came in to tell you: that one truckload
of steel grillage beams for the turbine footings--they were put out
where we surveyed for the first power house--dumped on the sand...."
"Well?" questioned Rawson, as Smithy paused. His look was daring
Smithy to say what he knew was coming.
"Five tons of steel beams," said Smithy softly, "gone--just like that!
Just a hollow in the sand!"
* * * * *
The big figure of the Irish foreman was still beside the door. Rawson
saw one clumsy hand make the sign of the Cross; then Riley held that
hand before him and stared at it in horror. "Divils' blood," he
whispered. "And I dipped my hands in it. Saints protect us all!"
"That will be all of that!" Dean Rawson's usually quiet voice was as
full of crackling emphasis as if it had been charged with electrical
energy. "If anyone thinks that I have gone this far, just to be scared
out by some dirty sabotage....
"I see it all. I don't know how they did it, but it's all come since
the gold was found. Someone else wants it. They think they can scare
off the men, maybe take a pot-shot at me, come back here and clean up
later on, pull up gold by the pailful, I suppose--"
Riley leaped forward and banged his big fist down on the table. "Right
ye are!" he shouted, until loitering men in the open "street" outside
stared curiously. "Divils they are, but they're the kind of divils we
know how to handle. And now I'll tell ye somethin' else, sir: I know
where they are hidin'.
"There was no work for anyone last night, but I'm used to bein' up. I
couldn't sleep. I was wanderin' around, thinkin' of nothin' at all out
of the way, and I thought I saw some shadows, like it might be men,
way off on the sand. Then later over to the old ghost town, d'ye mind!
I saw a light, a queer, green sort of light. Sure, a fool I was
callin' meself at the time, but now I believe it."
* * * * *
Dean Rawson had crossed the room while the man was still speaking. He
dragged a wooden case from beneath his cot and smashed at the lid with a
wrecking bar. Then he reached inside and drew forth a blue-black .45.
He tossed the pistol to Riley. "Know how to use one of these?" he
asked. The manner in which the big Irishman snapped open the side
ejection was sufficient answer. Dean handed another gun to Smithy,
then pulled out more and laid them on his cot together with a little
pile of cartridge boxes.
"You're all right, Riley," he said. "Just keep your head. Don't let
your damned superstitions run away with you, and I wouldn't ask for a
better man to stand alongside of in a scrap."
The foreman beamed with pleasure: Rawson went on in crisp sentences:
"Take these guns. Take plenty of ammunition. Pick five or six men you
know you can depend on. Mount guard around this camp to-night. I'll
post an order saying you're in charge--and I'm telling you now to use
those guns on anything you see.
"Smithy," he said to the other man who had been quietly listening,
"you and I are going to start for town. Only Riley will know that
we're gone for the night. We'll have a little listening post of our
own up here in the hills."
But Rawson postponed their going. More material was arriving; one
casting in particular needed all the men and Rawson's supervision to
place it on the sand where an erection crew could swing it into place
at some later date. And then, when he and Smithy had driven away from
camp with the distant city as their announced destination, Rawson
still did not go directly to the mountain grade. He swung off instead
where rolling sand-hills blocked all view from the camp, and he headed
the car into a gusty wind that brought whirling clouds of dust; they
almost obscured the crumbling walls at the volcano's base.
The ghost towns that are found here and there in the forsaken
wilderness of the West are depressing to one who walks their empty
streets. Little Rhyolite was no exception. In gray, ghostly walls,
empty windows stared steadily, disconcertingly like sockets of dead
eyes in tattered, weatherbeaten skulls.
* * * * *
Dean and Smithy walked among the roofless ruins. Lizards, the color of
the cold, gray walls, slipped from sight on silent, clinging feet.
Once a sidewinder, almost invisible against the sand, looped away from
the intruders with smooth deliberation.
"No marks here," said Rawson at last. "Even an Indian can't read sign
in this ashy sand when the wind has dusted it off."
He turned his head from a whirl of fine ash where the wind, sweeping
around a wall of stone, was scouring at a sand dune's sloping side.
"Dean," said Smithy, "old Riley may have been looking for banshees
when he saw these lights. Superstitious old cuss, Riley! Maybe there
wasn't anything here. But, Dean, there's some confoundedly funny
things happening around here."
"Are you telling me?" Rawson asked grimly. "But we want to remember
one thing," he added: "We've punched a hole in the ground, and we've
got into a place that is hot enough to melt Krieger alloy one minute
and is stone cold the next. That's disturbing enough, but we don't
want to get that mixed up with what's happening up top. There's dirty
work going on--"
He stopped. His eyes, that had never ceased to search for some mark of
special meaning, had come to rest upon an object half hidden in the
sand. He stooped and picked it up.
"Now what the devil is this?" Smithy began. But Rawson was staring at
the smooth lava block that was in his hand. It was tapered; it was
pierced through with a straight, smooth hole, and its base was round
and ringed as if it had been held in a clamp.
"That," he said at last, "was brought in from outside. Outside,
Smithy--get that."
* * * * *
Dean Rawson's face was wreathed in a sudden smile of pure pleasure. "No, I
don't know what the darn thing is," he admitted. "And I don't care. But I
know that someone, or some bunch of someones--outsiders--are trying to
horn in. I might even go so far as to say that I suspect the power
monopoly gentlemen. I think they have started in on us, plan to run off
our men, interfere in every way and drive me out of the field with the
boring a failure. Smithy, I begin to think I'm going to enjoy this job!"
Again the hot wind, only beginning to cool with the setting of the
sun, swept around the building where they stood and tore at the hill
of sand. "Come on," said Rawson. "It's getting dark. We'll get up to
our lookout--"
"Hold on!" called Smithy sharply.
Rawson turned. Smithy was rubbing his eyes when the whirl of
wind-borne sand had passed; he was staring at the sand dunes.
"I'm seeing things, I guess," he said. "I thought for a minute there
was a hole there, and the sand was slipping. I'm getting as bad as
Riley."
The two went back through the gathering shadows to their waiting car.
And Smithy's involuntary shiver told Rawson that he was not the only
one to feel a sense of relief at the sound of the exhaust as their car
took them away from the dead bones of a dead city in a barren,
trackless waste.
* * * * *
The shoulder of rock, where the mountain road swung out, gave a
comprehensive view of camp and desert and the encircling mountains.
Above in a vault of black was the dazzling array of stars as the
desert lands know them; so low they were, the ragged, broken tops of
the three ancient craters seemed touching the warm velvet of the sky
on which the stars were hung. Beyond their smooth slopes a spreading
glow gave promise of the rising moon.
Rawson headed the car downgrade in readiness for a quick return; he
ran it close to the inner wall of rock out of which the road had been
carved, then seated himself on the outer rim without thought of the
thousand-foot sheer drop beneath his dangling legs. With a glass he
was sweeping the foreground where the scattered lights of the camp
were like vagrant reflections of the stars thrown back to them from
the dead sea of sand.
"Riley's on the job," he told Smithy when he passed over the glass
later on. "And I've got my pocket portable." He took the little radio
receiver from his pocket as he spoke. "Riley will signal me from my
office if he sees anything."
The moon had cleared the mountains; its flood of light poured across
their rugged heights and filled the bowl of Tonah Basin as some master
of a great theatrical switchboard might have flooded a dark stage with
magic illumination, half concealing, transforming whatever things it
touched.
All the hard brilliance of sunlit sands was gone. The rolling dunes
were softly mellow; the more distant mountains were dream-peaks. Half
real, they seemed, and half imagined in a veil of haze. Even the
buildings, the scattered piles of material, the gaunt skeleton of the
derrick--their stark blackness of outline and clear-cut shadow were
gone; the whole land was drenched in the mystery and magic of a desert
moon.
* * * * *
Rawson and the man beside him were silent. Even a mind perplexed by
unanswerable problems must pause before the witchery of nature's
softer moods.
"If Riley were here," said Smithy softly at last, "he wouldn't be
seeing any devils. Fairies, pixies, the 'little people'--he'd be
seeing them dancing."
Rawson shot his companion a sidelong, appraising glance. He had never
penetrated before to this sub-stratum of Smithy's nature. He had
never, in fact, felt that he knew much about Smithy, whose past was
still the one topic that was never mentioned. He saw his thick mop of
black hair and the profile of his face as Smithy stared fixedly down
toward the sleeping camp. It was a matter of a minute or so before he
knew that the head was outlined against an aura of red light.
Smithy was seated at his right. Off beyond him the three extinct
craters made a dark background where the moonlight had not yet reached
to their inner slopes. Smithy's head was directly in line with the
largest crater's irregularly broken top; and about it was the faintest
tinge of red.
For a moment the light flamed close; it seemed to be hovering about
the head of the silent, seated man. Then Rawson moved, looked past,
and found a true perspective for the phenomenon. One rugged cleft in
the rim of the crater's cup made a peephole for seeing within. It was
plainly red--the light came from inside the age-old throat.
* * * * *
"It's alive!" Rawson whispered in quick consternation. Almost he
expected to see billowing clouds of smoke, the fearful pyrotechnics of
volcanic eruption.
He sensed more than saw that Smithy had not turned his head. "Look!"
he was shouting by now. "Wake up, Smithy! Good Lord!"
He stopped, open-mouthed. The red glow had meant volcanic fires; to
have it change abruptly to a green radiance was disconcerting.
Green--pale green. Only through the gap, like a space where a tooth
was missing in the giant jaw, could Dean Rawson see the changed light.
Only from this one point could the view be had--there would be nothing
visible from the camp below. And as quickly as it had come all
thought of volcanic fires left him; he knew with quick certainty that
this was something that concerned him, that threatened, and that was
linked up with the other threatening, mysterious happenings of the
recent nights and days.
Still Smithy had not turned. Rawson felt one quick flash of annoyance
at his helper's dullness--or indifference; then he knew that Smithy's
dark-haired head was reached forward, that he was bending at a
precarious angle to stare below him into the valley. Then:
"They're there!" said Smithy in a hushed voice, as if someone or
something on that desert floor far below might hear and take alarm.
"Look, Dean. Where's your glass? What are they?"
* * * * *
His cautious whispering was unnecessary. Below them a thin line of
light pierced the darkness; another; then three more in quick
succession before the sharp crack of pistol fire came to the men a
thousand feet above. Rawson had snatched up his binoculars.
"To the left," Smithy was directing. "Off there, by the big casting.
Great Scott! what's that light?"
Rawson got it in the glass--a single flash of green that cut the
blackness with an almost audible hiss. It was gone in an instant while
a man's voice screamed once in fear and agony, one scream that broke
like brittle steel in the same instant that it began.
Dean found the big casting in the circle of his glass. There were
black figures moving near it; they were indistinct. He changed the
focus--they were gone before he could get their images sharp.
But the casting! Plainly he saw its great bulk that many men had
worked to ease down to the sand. It was outlined clearly now until its
edge became a blur, until the sand rolled in upon it, and its black
mass became a circle that shrank and shrank and vanished utterly at
the last.
"It's gone!" Rawson shouted. "It sank into the sand! I saw it...."
He was running for the car. A clamor of voices was coming from below;
the sound died under the thunder of the car's exhaust as Rawson gave
it the gun and sent the big machine leaping toward the waiting curves.