THE CAVE
Electing the turn to the left, Radcliffe led the way with his carbide
lamp. Ace and Ted followed with their candles.
This time their choice was quickly verified by the discovery of the
burros, standing patiently with their packs before the pool. (That
accounted for the muddy footprints.) Skirting this on the shelving ledge
as had Pedro and the Mexicans, they traversed the winding passageway that
led to the grotto of brown cauliflower-like encrustations. But here, when
they found that the left-hand passageway meant going on hands and knees,
they chose the other turn. (They came that near to catching up with the
fugitives!)
With the suddenness of events in a dream, they came into a vast chamber
that at first glimpse, lighted as it was by the carbide lamp, gave the
impression of a baronial ruin. The boys whistled simultaneously under
their breath. At the far end stood a huge stone elephant,--or so it
appeared at the first startled glance,--and beside him a gnome and
several weird beasts vaguely reminiscent of the monsters of prehistoric
times.
When Ted could speak, he whispered, "What are they? Fossils?"
Ace laughed. "I should say not. They're nothing but dripstone, can't you
see?--They'd be 'some fossils'! Why, if we could find just one fossil as
big as that, our fortunes would be made--absolutely."
"Gee! Then I'm sure going to keep my eyes peeled."
"I thought," put in Radcliffe, "that fossils were little stone worms.
I've found those aplenty."
"Fossils," explained Ace, (fresh from first-year geology), "are any
remains of plants or animals that lived, either on land or in the sea, in
ancient times. A lot of those we find to-day were shell-fish and other
marine life."
"Gee!" grinned Ted, "doesn't he talk like a professor? I'm going to call
you professor after this, old Scout!"
"Go on," the Ranger urged, ignoring this sally, "I'm interested."
"So am I, honestly," amended Ted contritely.
"There were land animals, too, that got buried in the accumulating
sediments and fossilized. Times when the ocean over-ran the land, they
got drifted into it, and sank, and got buried under the sands that made
our sandstones----"
"This floor is sandstone!" interpolated Ted.
"Yes. Or they got buried in the ground-up shells that made our
limestone,--like the walls of the cave,--or some of them were buried in
mud."
"I suppose," offered Ted facetiously, "that the mud made mudstones," and
he laughed till his voice echoed and reechoed startlingly.
"Ha, ha! You're right!" Ace turned the laugh on him. "Go to the head of
the class. I'll show you mudstone when we come to it."
"Why, then," ventured the Ranger, "this must be a topping place to find
fossils."
"Provided," Ace admitted, "the cave is not of too recent formation. But
as I was about to say," (seeing their undoubted interest), "geologists
can just about piece together the history of the earth from the fossils
that have been found, but no one locality gives it all. They have
found part of the story in America and part in Africa, and parts
in Europe and Asia. And from that series of fossils--and some other
evidence--scientists have about agreed that since the earth was formed,
about twenty whole mountain ranges, one after another, must have been
formed and worn away almost to sea level."
"How do they make that out?" Ted looked skeptical.
"That's another long story. I'm no professor. But----"
"You can't prove it."
"Neither can you disprove it, any more than you can the conclusions on
which astronomy, higher mathematics, any of the sciences--are based."
"I suppose so! Gee, I'd like to study those things for myself!" sighed
Ted, seating himself beside the others on a dry ledge while they ate
their sandwiches.
"Find a valuable fossil and you've earned a college education," Ace
challenged him. "And you know, fossils are not necessarily fish or
insects or skeletons or tree trunks that have been turned to stone."
"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 passageways, (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 passageway? 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 stalactites,
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 cocked
in his right hand. Ever and anon he stopped breath-still to listen.
Passing through the same alabaster cavern that had so impressed the
Spanish boy, his eye caught the bandanna Pedro had dropped in the
left-hand passageway. 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 assured 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, bumped 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 prickled,--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 thorny 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 cocked 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,
stalactites 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.
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 attitude 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 pronouncement.
"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.