_The Attack_
Every light of the camp was on as Rawson and his assistant approached.
A shallow depression in the sand marked the place where the big
casting had been. Beyond it a hundred feet was a black swarm of men
that parted as the car drew near. They had been gathered about a
figure upon the sand.
Dean sensed something peculiar about that figure as the big car
ploughed to a stop. He leaped out and ran forward.
He knew it was Riley there on the ground, knew it while still he was a
score of feet away. Only when he was close, however, did he realize
that the body ended in two stubs of legs; only when he leaned above
him did he know that the Irish foreman's big frame had been cut in two
as if by a knife.
The severed legs lay a short distance beyond the body; they had fallen
side by side in horrible awkwardness, their stumps of flesh protruding
from charred clothing--and suddenly, shockingly, Rawson knew that the
flesh of body and legs had been seared. The knife had been hot--its
blade had been forged of flame!
He heard Smithy cursing softly, unconsciously, at his side.
"The green light," Smithy was saying in horrified understanding. "But
who did it? How did they do it? Where did they go?"
"Quiet!" ordered Rawson sharply. He dropped to his knees beside the
mutilated body. Riley's eyes had opened in a sudden movement of
consciousness.
* * * * *
The voice that came from his lips was a ghastly whisper at first, but
in that stricken thing that had been the body of Riley, foreman of the
night drilling crew, some reservoir of strength must still have
remained untapped.
He drew upon it now. His voice roared again as it had done so many
times before through the Tonah Basin camp. It reached to every
listening ear where crowding men stood hushed and motionless; and the
overtone of terror that altered its customary timber was apparent to
all.
"Devils!" said Riley. "Devils, straight out o' hell!... I saw 'em--I
saw 'em plain!... I shot--as if hot lead could harm the imps of
Satan....
"Oh, sir,"--his eyes had found those of Dean Rawson who was leaning
above--"for the love of hivin, Mister Rawson, do ye be quittin'
drillin'. The place is damned. L'ave it, sir; go away...."
His eyes closed. But he started up once more; he raised his head from
the sand with one final convulsive movement, and his voice was high
and shrill.
"The fire! The fire of hell! He's turnin' it on me! God help...."
But Riley, before his failing mind could recall again that torturing
jet of flame, must have slipped away into a darkness as softly
enveloping as the velvet shadow world behind the low-hung stars.
Rawson's hand that felt for a moment above the heart, confirmed the
message of the closed eyes and the head that fell inertly back.
He came slowly to his feet.
"Keep the floods on!" he ordered. "Take command of the armed guard,
Smithy; keep the whole camp patrolled."
Then to the men:
"Boys, Riley was wrong. He believed what he said, all right, but Smith
and I know better. Don't worry about devils. These're just some dirty,
skulking dogs who got away with murder this time but who won't do it
again. We know where they're hiding. I'm checking up on them right
now. After that you'll all get a chance to square accounts for poor
old Riley!"
* * * * *
"But the casting!" Smithy protested when he and Rawson were alone.
"You can't explain that disappearance so easy, Dean."
"No, I can't explain that," Rawson's words came slowly. "They've got
something that we don't understand as yet--but I'm going to know the
answer, and I'm going to find out to-night!"
He was seated behind the wheel of his old car.
"I'm as good a desert man as there is in this crowd," he told Smith.
"And it's my fight, you know. I'm going alone. But there'll be no
fighting this trip; I'll just be scouting around."
He leaned from the car to grip Smithy's shoulder with a hand firm and
steady.
"You didn't see the crater when the show was on. You think that I'm
crazy to believe it, but up in that crater is where I'll find the
answer to a lot of questions. Lord knows what that answer will be.
I've quit trying to guess. I'm just going up there to find out."
He was gone, the rear wheels of the car throwing a spray of sand as he
started heedless of Smithy's protests against the plan. Rawson was in
no mood to argue. He must climb the mountain while it was night; under
the sun he would never reach the top alive. He would go alone and
unseen.
He swung wide of the deserted town at the mountain's base. The
spectral walls of Little Rhyolite still showed their empty windows
that stared like dead eyes, and the man guided his car without lights
along a hidden stretch of hard, salt-crusted desert. He felt certain
that other eyes were watching.
* * * * *
He began his climb at a point five miles away. The slopes that seemed
smooth and hard from a distance became, at closer range, a place of
wind-heaped, sandy ash, carved and scoured into fantastic forms. But
its very roughness offered protection, and Rawson fought the dragging
sand, and the gray, choking ash that dried his throat and cut it like
emery, without fear of being observed.
He fought against time, too. Above Little Rhyolite, whatever
mysterious men were making the ascent would find the going easy. There
were windswept areas, long fields of pumice; a man could make good
time there. Rawson had none of these to aid him. He cast anxious
glances toward the eastern sky as he struggled on, till he saw gray
light change to rose and gold--but he stood in the titanic cleft in
the crater's rim as the first straight rays of the sun struck across.
The volcano's top had been stripped clean by the winds of countless
years. Rocks, black, brown, even blood-red, were naked to the pitiless
glare of the sun. Their colors were mingled in a weird fantasy of
twisted lines that told of the inferno of heat in which they had been
formed.
They towered high above the head of Dean Rawson as he stood, panting
and trembling with exhaustion. The cleft before him had become
enormous: it was a canyon, half filled with pumice and coarse ash.
* * * * *
Rawson stood for long minutes in quiet listening. At the canyon's end
would lie the crater, and in that crater he would find.... But there
was no slightest picture in his mind of what he might see. He knew
only that he himself must remain unseen. He went forward cautiously.
Rocky walls; a floor of sand where his feet left no mark. He was
watching ahead and above him. His gun was ready in his hand; he did
not propose to be ambushed. He moved with never a sound.
The silence persisted; no living thing other than himself lent any
flicker of motion to the scene. Not even a lizard could hope for
existence amid these dead and barren heights. He was alone--the
certainty of it had driven deeply into his mind before the canyon end
was reached. And, desert man though he was and accustomed to traveling
the waste places of the earth, Rawson learned a new meaning and depth
of solitude.
Here was no voiceless companionship of trees or brush or cactus; no
little living things scuttled across the rocks--he was alone, the only
speck of life in a place where life seemed forbidden.
So sure of this was he that he stepped boldly from the canyon's end.
He knew before he looked that he would see only more of the same
desolation. And his mind was filled equally with anger and
disappointment.
* * * * *
Something was opposing him! Something had come into their camp--had
killed old Riley. And he, Rawson, had been so sure he would find
traces here that would allow him to give that opposing force a
name....
He stared out from the rocky cleft into a sun-blasted pit. Already
the rising sun was pouring its energy ever the jagged rim of bleak
rocks and down into the vast throat, choked and filled with ash.
It sloped gently from all sides, the gray-brown powder that had been
coughed from within the earth. It made a floor where Rawson could have
walked with safety. But he did not go on.
"Damn it!" he said with sudden savagery. "What a fool I was to think
of finding anyone here. Who would ever pick out a spot like this for a
base of operations?"
He stared angrily at the floor of ash, at the black, outcropping
masses of tufa. He was angry with himself, angry and baffled and tired
from his climb. Far down in the vast, shallow pit blazing sunlight
glinted from massive blocks whose sides were mirror-smooth. A whirl of
wind eddied there for a moment and lifted the dust into a vertical
gray column--the only sign of motion in the whole desolate scene.
Rawson turned and tramped back toward the long hot descent to the
floor of the Basin.
* * * * *
He tried to maintain an air of confidence before the men. He kept them
busy placing and stacking materials; to all appearances the work would
go on despite the mysterious happenings of the night.
Dean even prepared to resume drilling operations. He sent down another
bailer on the end of the ten-mile cable, but he left it there; he did
not care to raise it and risk more inexplicable results with the
consequent destruction of the men's morale.
"Too late to do any more," he said to Smithy that afternoon. "We'll
drop all work--let the men get a good night's sleep. I'll take guard
duty to-night, and you can run the job to-morrow."
There were men of the drilling crew standing near, though Rawson was
handling the hoisting drums himself. A ratchet release lever hooked
its end under a ring on Rawson's hand and pinched the flesh. Dean made
this an excuse for waiting a moment while the drillers walked away.
"Ought not to wear it, I suppose," he said, and dabbed at a spot of
blood under the gold band. "But it's an old cameo--it belonged to my
Dad."
He was showing the ring to Smithy as the men passed from hearing.
"Don't want to be seen talking," he explained tersely. "Mustn't let
the men know we are on edge--they're about ready to bolt. But you be
ready for a call. Have your men armed. I am looking for more trouble
to-night."
The two were laughing loudly as they followed the men toward the
building where the cook was banging on an iron tire that served as a
bell.
* * * * *
Some three hours later Rawson was not smiling as he climbed the steel
ladder of the great derrick; he was grimly intent upon the job at
hand.
All thought of his drilling operations had gone from him. He was not
anxious about the project. This was merely an interruption; the work
would go on later. But right now there was an enemy to be met and a
mystery to be solved.
A rifle slung from his shoulder bumped against him satisfyingly as he
climbed. A man was on duty at a master switch--he would flood the camp
with light at the rifle's first crack.
Dean seated himself at the top of the derrick. The cylinder of a huge
floodlight was beside him. Beyond was the massive sheave block; the
cables ran dizzily down to the concrete drilling floor so far below.
And on every side the quiet camp spread out dark and silent in the
night. Dean surveyed it all with satisfaction. Nothing would get by
him now.
But his further reflections were not so satisfying.
"Who did it? How? Where did they go?" He was echoing Smithy's
questions and finding no ready answers. And that flame-thrower that
had cut down old Riley--how was that worked? Its one green flash had
been almost instantaneous.
He was puzzling over such futile questioning when he saw the first
sign of attack.
* * * * *
At the foot of the derrick was the hoisting shed. Except for that,
there was clear sand for a radius of fifty feet around the derrick's
base. Dean was staring suspiciously at that open space almost directly
underneath.
Moving sand! He hardly knew what he had seen at first. Then the sand
at one point bulged upward unmistakably.
For one instant Dean's thoughts shot off at a tangent. It was like the
work of a huge gopher--he had seen the little animals break through
like that. Then the sand parted, and something, indistinct, blurred,
dark against the yellow background, broke from cover.
Rawson swung the rifle's muzzle over and down. Below him the vague
shadow had moved. Dean caught the blurred mass beyond his sights, then
swung the weapon aside. Who was it? He would have a look first.
The thin crack of his rifle ripped the silence of the sleeping camp.
Dean had aimed to one side and he regretted it in the instant of
firing. For, in the same second, there had come from the moving shadow
the gleam of starlight reflected upward from polished metal.
* * * * *
Dean swung the rifle back. He fired quickly a second time. Beside him
the big light hissed into action and the whole camp sprang to sudden,
blazing light. And through the quick brilliance, more dazzling even
than the white glare itself, was one blinding line of green flame.
Dean saw it as it began. It came from the dim shadow that had sprung
suddenly into sharp outline as the big lights came on. He saw the
figure. He sensed that it was a man, though he knew vaguely that the
figure was grotesque and hideous in some manner he had no time to
discern.
The thin line of green flame ripped straight out, swinging in a quick,
sweeping trajectory, slashing through the steelwork of the great
derrick itself!
Dean knew he was lost in the blinding instant while that fiery jet was
sweeping in a fan-shaped sector of vivid green. A knife of flame! It
had destroyed a man: it was now cutting down a framework of steel as
well!
The derrick was falling as he fired again. There came a crushing jar
downward as the metal melted and failed, and the wild outward swing in
the beginning of the toppling fall. In the mind of Dean Rawson was but
one thought: the sights--and a something blurred beyond--a trigger to
be pressed.
He was still firing when the shriek of torn steel went to thundering
silence, and even the lights of Tonah Basin Camp were swallowed up in
the whirling night....