IN THE GRIP OF TERROR
"Oh, there's honey in the rock, my brother,
There's honey in the rock for you."
Johnny was listening to the second phonographic record. In high-pitched
falsetto note the singer had repeated these words over and over. That was
all. If the other message had seemed void of meaning, this one appeared
doubly so, for here there were no improvised lines, only these two taken
from a threadbare religious song. What could it mean?
Johnny did not puzzle over this long. There were too many other important
matters to attend to. Dangers confronted them. He did not fear the natives
for the present. But the Bolsheviki? If they were coming this way, then
here indeed was peril enough.
"Dave," he said, after a long period of musing by the fire, "I'm going to
take the team of gray wolf-hounds with a two-day supply of food and go see
what all this talk about Russians means. I won't be in danger of being
followed by natives, for I shall start long before sunrise. I'd send the
boys with the airplane, but the sight of the machine would give us dead
away. I can probably obtain the information we need concerning their
numbers, rate of travel and so on, and not be seen at all.
"I shall leave matters in your hands. Push the mining in No. 2 to the
utmost and get the richest of the mother-lode panned as speedily as
possible. A hundredweight of gold would mean much. Should I fail to
return, and should conditions seem to warrant the abandoning of camp, send
the plane out to look for me. If they fail to locate me, take no chances.
Clear the ice with the schooner as quickly as you can. I shall be all
right. I came to this place from Vladivostok once by reindeer, and went
north to Bering Strait the same way. I can take care of myself."
"All right," said Dave, a trifle anxiously. "I'll do just as you say. Good
luck, and may you come back."
They gripped hands for a second, then parted.
In the meantime, over in the corner, with a discarded shirt thrust into
the horn of the phonograph as a muffler, Pant was playing that newly-found
record over and over. A puzzled frown wrinkled his forehead above the
goggles.
Presently he sat up straight, and, tearing the muffler away, started the
machine. His hands trembled as he sank back in his chair, limp with
excitement. He allowed the record to grind its way out to the very end,
then he nodded his head and murmured:
"Yes, that's it, 'money in the rock.' _Money_, plenty of it."
When Johnny started out at four o'clock the next morning, he set his dogs
zig-zagging back and forth to the land side of their cabin. He was hunting
the invisible trail of the Reindeer Chukche who had come from the interior
the day before. When once the dog-leader had come upon the scent of it,
the team bounded straight away over the tundra.
The cabin soon faded from view. First came the frozen bed of the river,
then a chain of low-lying hills, then broad stretches of tundra again,
with, here and there, a narrow willow-lined stream twisting in and out
between snow-banks. The steady pat-pat of his "mucklucks" (skin boots)
carried him far that day, but brought him no sight of the reported
Russians.
After a brief sleep, he was away again. He had traveled for eight hours
more, when, upon skirting the edge of a long line of willows by a river's
brink, he imagined he caught sight of a skulking figure on the further
bank. He could not be sure of it. He pressed on, his dogs still trailing
the reindeer sled. If they had come near the Russian camp, the trail would
doubtless have made a direct turn to right or left of it to escape passing
too closely. The Chukches avoided these Russians as merchant ships of old
avoided a pirate bark. Contact with them meant loss of their reindeer,
perhaps death as well.
So, confident in his false security, Johnny pushed on. But just as he was
about to emerge from the river-bed, a dozen armed ruffians of the most
vicious-looking type sprang from the willows.
"Whoa!"
Resistance was useless; Johnny stopped his team. He looked back and, to
his disgust, he saw that their camp was pitched on the other side of that
long row of willows. These shrubs had been caught by the frost when their
leaves were yet green. The leaves had not fallen off, and, even at this
time of year, formed a perfect screen, a fact for which Johnny was later
to be profoundly grateful.
In vain he attempted to play up in a friendly fashion to the Bolsheviki.
They looked upon him as an enemy and a hostage, for, in the first place,
did they not know that American soldiers had, for many months, guarded a
section of the Trans-Siberian Railroad against their armies? And, in the
second place, did not Johnny drive a splendid team of gray wolf-hounds,
which would be of great service to them in their march to the coast? They
did not understand how he came there. They asked him all manner of foolish
questions, to which he gave quite as foolish answers, and, when this was
at an end, they fitted a rusty pair of "bracelets" to his feet, and,
thrusting him inside a vile-smelling tent, gave him vermin-infested
blankets to sleep in and sour brown bread to eat.
"Here's a pretty mess!" he stormed silently to himself. "There's at least
a hundred of them. They must travel slowly, but even so, four days will
bring them to the coast; then, unless the unforeseen happens, it's the
ocean for our outfit, or perhaps worse than death. And if anything goes
wrong, it's all my fault because I failed to consider that this bunch
would have moved forward from where the Chukche saw them. I only hope the
boys find out in time."
He listened for a while with aching heart to the wail of his dogs, who had
been turned into their snowy beds without their supper, and, at last, from
sheer exhaustion, he fell asleep.
Two days later he was led toward a peculiar square cabinet that had been
set up in the snow. Beside it was a pile of glowing embers left from a
fire of willows. The ten men who marched beside him were not armed. Since
they pressed about him on all sides, cutting off all chance of his escape,
no weapons were needed.
They had not told him what they meant to do. What the cabinet was, what
the bed of coals meant, he could not even guess. Malignant grins gave the
faces of the men a look that made his blood run cold. He had seen such an
expression only once before, and that in the movies when Indians grinned
at the prospect of burning an enemy at the stake.
He was soon inside the cabinet with one of his guards. This cabinet was
divided into two compartments, each about four feet square. As soon as he
entered one of these, he was told to remove all his clothing and was then
handed a large, coarse towel. At this, he heaved a sigh of relief and even
chuckled a little at his fright. He was merely being given a bath--a
Russian steam-bath. He had heard of such baths, and was now thoroughly in
favor of them.
"A bath is a bath," he whispered to himself as he twisted the towel about
his hips, "and a great luxury in this country."
He was pushed into the other compartment. It was stinging cold out here. A
second guard appeared with a great metal can filled with the glowing coals
from the fire Johnny had seen outside. He set this down upon a small
stand, the top of which was on a level with Johnny's waist, and backed
out. A third man appeared with a bucket of water and a huge gourd. Taking
a position directly in front of the door, this guard dipped a full gourd
of water and poured it on the coals. Instantly a dense cloud of steam rose
to the ceiling. This much steam, Johnny figured, would give one a
comfortable bath. But at that moment, with a fiendish leer on his face,
the man threw on another gourdful, then another. The door slammed and a
bar thudded into place.
Immediately Johnny took in the full horror of his situation. He was to be
steamed alive. Already the dense, white cloud was descending. Lower and
lower it came. He crouched down to avoid it. In another moment, it would
engulf him. No man could live in such a place.
His mind worked like chain-lightning. This cabinet? How was it fastened
down? How strongly? His fingers felt for the lower edge of it. Working
them down and under, he secured a hold. Then, with all his superb
strength, he heaved away. Something snapped, but still the thing held
firm. He heaved again. The touch of steam on his back lent him new power.
Crack! Crack! Then the uprooted cabinet swayed a second and then crashed
into three of the gaping spectators.
Johnny leaped forward. A burly fellow seized his arms. Using an old
college trick, Johnny fell backward, taking the man with him. Then, with
his foot on the other's stomach, he sent him whirling into two other men,
and, before they could recover from their astonishment, Johnny went
sprinting down the side of the long row of willows, which had proved his
downfall two days before.
He was headed for home. No Russian, nor Russian dog-team, could catch him.
But he was clad only in a towel, and there were many miles of snow between
him and his friends.
Suddenly, from the rear, there came the ki-yi of dogs.
"Hounds!" he murmured in despair. "Unhitched from the sled. They'll catch
me. I can't escape them." He stared wildly to right and left as he ran,
but saw no way of escape.
* * * * *
After Johnny Thompson had left camp in search of the Bolshevik band that
eventful morning, he was no more than out of sight when a slight figure
crept from a snow-buried pup tent to the right of the cabin and went
gliding away up the hill in the moonlight. It was Pant. Rapidly he scaled
the snow-packed hillside. Arriving at last at the foot of the rocky cliff,
he began a minute examination of those cliffs. Once he climbed to a dizzy
height by clinging to the crags. It was a cat-like feat which very few
persons could perform, but he did it with consummate ease. At another time
he dropped flat on his stomach and crept into a broad crevice between the
rocks. He was gone for a long time, but finally appeared grimy with dirt
and empty-handed.
"'Money in the rock,'" he murmured. "'Money in the rock for you.'"
Then, as if discouraged with his quest, he turned and started down the
hill.
He had covered half the distance when something caught his eye. A black
spot, the size of a baseball, had bounced mysteriously past him.
In a twinkling, he was away in mad pursuit. Slipping, sliding, bounding
over the glistening surface, turning a somersault to land on his feet and
race ahead, he very soon came up with the thing where it had lodged
against a protruding flat rock.
His fingers grasped it eagerly. Here was a third message from the unknown
one. Perhaps this would explain all.