RESURRECTION
He felt the ground warm under him, the divine warmth of the fire, and
he let himself fall at full length and shut his eyes. A phantom voice
faintly penetrated his ears.
“Are you hurt? Oh, you poor, poor boy! Where have you been?”
To answer was beyond him. It was all a strange dream. He felt himself
gently pulled forward. The warmth grew yet more heavenly. His face was
wiped; it must be a nurse, he thought, with a dim idea of a hospital.
He was covered up with something. It seemed to him that some one had
kissed him. It was a celestial dream.
He must really have lapsed into profound unconsciousness. He seemed to
be dragged out of depths like death by somebody lifting his head, and
repeatedly telling him to take something until the words penetrated to
his mind. He opened his lips without opening his eyes, felt something
warm and wet, swallowed obediently. It was soup, hot and strong. A few
mouthfuls went down, and ran through his whole system like a
stimulant. He looked up.
He saw a face that he knew. It was upside down as he looked at it. His
head was on a woman’s lap, and she was holding the tin of soup to his
lips. It was no hallucination. A sense of warm, full contentment came
over him, and quite automatically he put the soup aside, put up his
arm weakly, and drew that face down to his own.
The contact was warm, electric. His brain cleared suddenly into full
wakefulness.
“Eva—Eva!” he exclaimed. “It’s you? It’s impossible.”
She gently disengaged her head, and he saw that she was flushed and
her eyes were winking with tears, and her face beamed.
“Don’t talk now,” she said. “Drink the rest of this.”
He knew she was right. He swallowed the rest of the contents of the
tin that she held to his lips, looking at her meanwhile, marveling.
These things seemed miraculous to him. His strength came back as he
drank, and he realized the crisis that must be upon him—since Eva was
here.
“What’s the situation?” he asked. “Where’s your father? Is he better?
And Carroll—and the _Chita_? How do you come to be here ashore? There
must be danger. Tell me. I’m all right now.”
“Father’s much better. He’s not strong yet, but he can talk almost as
well as ever. The _Chita_ is out there in the bay. How did you know
her name? Father is aboard her, and Carrero and Diego—two Chileans who
don’t speak anything but Spanish.”
“Carrero—Diego? So they speak nothing but Spanish? Of course! Doesn’t
Morrison suspect who they are?”
“Of course he knows they’re enemies—now. We got them in Valparaiso.
Father was desperately anxious to get here as fast as he could. He
thought—he believed—that you——”
“I know!” Lang exclaimed as she hesitated. “He thought I was trying to
beat him to it. I don’t blame him. It looked awfully fishy. I’ll
explain. Go on.”
“But I didn’t think it,” Eva hastened to say. “I knew there was
something wrong. I was worried—dreadfully afraid. Carrero met my
father soon after we got to Valparaiso, and offered him the boat. It
seemed just the thing. We had it fitted out, and started, and we
joined it at Talhuna. We were three days out before father suspected
anything wrong.
“He didn’t tell me much, but he gave me a little pistol to wear
always. I could feel danger in the air. Father decided to go on to La
Carolina, and take aboard two or three men whom he knew well, but
Carrero refused to go. He seemed to know the way to this place, and he
ran the boat into the bay early this morning, and demanded that father
lead them to the emeralds. He offered to share them equally.
“Of course father refused. They argued and threatened for hours.
Finally they put me ashore, and said that I would stay there till the
emeralds were found.”
“The devils!” Lang exclaimed. “I’ll maroon Carroll for this.”
“Oh, I wasn’t afraid, for myself,” said Eva. “I knew they wouldn’t
dare keep me here long. I climbed up the bank in the fog, and walked
about, and then I smelled smoke, and came upon your fire. Do you know,
I just knew at once that it was your camp. I sat down and waited. I’d
been here hours. Then I saw you coming. I shall never forget how you
looked—as if you’d come from the dead.”
“From the dead? So I had!” cried Lang. He sat up and burst the knotted
strings around his ankles. A stream of wet, rolling, twinkling
crystals rolled out, pebbles and bits of rock and chips of ice along
with them. Eva gave a little, startled cry.
“I’ve been through hell and the glacier. I think I bored the glacier
from end to end. I came from the dead, all right, and I brought back
what I went for. Here they are—the emeralds!”
“The emeralds—those little stones? And so few?”
“So few? They may be worth a million dollars—sure to be, if they’re
all perfect. But they aren’t. And there’s a lot of rubbish mixed with
them. I couldn’t sort them there in the dark.”
A shudder went through him at the memory of that ghastly ice cavern.
It seemed unreal now as a distant nightmare. He began to pick out
pieces of rock and discard them. Eva turned the stones over in her
fingers with more respect.
“Look at this one—and this,” he said, “and think of what the jewelers
charge you for a little emerald the size of a pea. And this! It would
be worth a fortune in itself, but I’m afraid it’s imperfect. The
smaller ones are better.”
By the daylight he could gauge the stones, and he was able to throw
out a great many obviously worthless bits, rough greenish matrix, or
plain fragments of stone. Between them they sorted the heap. Eva laid
her little striped scarf on the ground, and they placed the pick of
the stones upon it in a little, growing pile; and meanwhile Lang gave
her a hurried, abbreviated account of his adventures—his kidnaping,
his voyages, his shipwreck and subsequent struggles.
“Oh, what hardships! How you have suffered!” Eva exclaimed, almost
tearfully. “And all for _this_,” pointing to the jewel heap; “it
wasn’t worth it.”
“No, it wasn’t,” said Lang. “But it wasn’t all for that. It was——Well,
if those emeralds should bring a million dollars they’d never be worth
the feeling I had when I opened my eyes just now and saw your face
looking down at me—and it was upside down, too.”
He looked into her eyes, half smiling, half appealingly. He could not
mistake the look of tenderness in the brown eyes that met his
unreluctantly. A surge of pride, of exultation rose through him. He
put out his hand, but before he touched her the girl’s face changed
sharply. She uttered a faint, startled cry; and Lang, jerking about,
caught a glimpse of a huge, blurred figure emerging soundlessly from
the fog, already hardly ten feet away.
He saw the black beard, the fur cap sparkling with drops of moisture;
and without a word he snatched at the automatic pistol in his hip
pocket.
“Drop that! Drop it, Lang, I say!” cried Carroll sharply, already with
his weapon drawn. But Lang desperately pulled the trigger. The wet
mechanism stuck.
“Hands up, Lang—both of you—or I’ll drop you cold!” Carroll ordered,
drawing a bead on the doctor’s chest; and Lang savagely hurled the
useless pistol down and put up his hands. Carroll looked triumphantly
at them both.
“Do you know, I half expected to find you here,” he remarked. “Yes, I
sort of guessed you’d got ahead of us, though I’m damned if I see how
you did it; but you always were quick.”
His eyes fell suddenly on the little heap of stones. He bent forward,
then straightened up with a hissed ejaculation, tense, glaring.
“You did it after all, did you? Get back; keep back!”
He bent again and gathered up the scarf, drew the emeralds together
and knotted up the corners, keeping a keen eye on his prisoners. He
slipped the extemporized sack into his pocket, with a red-and-white
scarf end hanging out.
“You stay where you are for half an hour,” he commanded. “I’ll be
watching you. One move, and it’ll be the last you’ll make.”
He edged away, his face over his shoulder. His figure was growing
faint in the fog, when Lang leaped toward the bark layers that covered
his rifle. He snatched it out, aimed, fired, once—twice at the
vanishing form. It seemed to lurch, stumble; and a pale flash came
back from it, with a bullet that knocked up the fire cinders. Lang
fired again, and then the figure had entirely disappeared.
“He mustn’t get back to the boat!” he exclaimed. “We must head him
off.”
Once aboard, he realized like a flash, Carroll would put on the power
and leave them marooned. He started impulsively away, halted dizzily,
not knowing in which direction lay the sea.
Eva took his hand and guided him. A breeze had risen, and the fog was
sweeping in, huge pillars and billows of it. Through its blinding
density, they ran together down the slope, and must have been near the
water when Lang heard a sound of hurrying footsteps ahead.
He had expected that. He drew Eva aside into the shelter of a dense
cedar shrub. A figure grew in the fog, growing to a slim, boyish form,
running so as to pass directly where Lang stood. He stepped suddenly
out.
“Is that you, Carroll?” exclaimed the runner. “What was that shooting?
Hell!”
Lang’s rifle was already swinging, but the gunman was so swift that he
already had his revolver clear of his pocket when the steel rifle
barrel crashed down on his skull. He dropped limply, flinging his arms
wide. Lang picked up the pistol and stood listening. No sound came
from landward.
“We’ve headed him off,” he said. “Go on board, Eva, and tell your
father what’s happened. Tell him to let no one aboard. I suppose he’s
armed. I’ve got to get our treasure back.”
She hesitated dumbly. He gathered her into his arms with a passionate
impulse, holding her close, kissing her wet face, her lips. She clung
to him, her eyes shut, responding to his kisses, until he let her go,
looking dazed and dreamy.
“Go aboard quickly, dearest,” he said.
“You’re going to risk your life—you mustn’t!” she murmured.
“Trust me. Don’t worry. Just go aboard,” he answered, and wheeled,
casting another look at the senseless, or dead Louie.
He ran back up the slope, his rifle cocked, looking about him keenly.
In his excitement he had no sense of danger. The thought that the
emeralds should be lost at this stage was maddening to him, after all
the horrors he had gone through to get them. But he knew that Carroll
could not have gone far; he could make no final escape on that
desolate coast; he would assuredly be rounded up.
He came to the place where Carroll had disappeared. Searching the
ground closely, he found spots of blood. Carroll had really been hit,
then; but it could not have been severely, for he had gone on, and the
blood-drops ended after the first few yards.
A scout might have trailed him, but it was vain for Lang to try. He
prowled forward in the direction Carroll had been taking, rifle ready
to shoot, realizing now that he was very liable to be shot down
suddenly himself. He thought once that a shadow rose and flitted
before him. He shouted, and then fired after it; but on going forward
he found neither traces nor tracks.
He prowled ahead again, sweeping a wide circle, groping past shrubs
and tree clumps that looked like men in the fog. He had gone a couple
of hundred yards when a flash and report spat from a thicket ten feet
ahead, with a ringing sound in the air by his ears. His nervous start
fired the rifle from the hip. Instantly he dropped flat, and fired
again at the point where he had seen the flash.
Nothing replied. The fog rolled over and over in clearing waves. After
lying strained to high tension for fifteen minutes, Lang crawled
cautiously forward. He found footprints in the soft ground this time,
but Carroll had slipped away.
Again he resumed the slow scouting forward, more keenly strung up than
ever. The air seemed to be growing dim, though the fog was certainly
clearing. It came upon him that it must be evening. He had forgotten
the hours; he had lost all track of time, and did not know whether it
was still the same day that he had fallen into the glacier. It might
have been the next day, or the next. In fact, he felt as if whole ages
had elapsed since that tumble into the crevice.
He stared up the obscure slope, where the fog cleared, and closed, and
cleared vaguely in the dusk. It was useless to pursue Carroll in the
dark, and might be suicidal. The fugitive could not get away,
especially since he was wounded. He was without food. He could be
captured the next morning. Lang stood out in the open and shouted.
“Carroll! Carroll! Come out. Surrender. Give back the stones and we’ll
call it off.”
His voice echoed weirdly up the hillside, but there was no answer. He
shouted again, at the utmost pitch of his voice.
All at once he remembered that the magazine of his rifle could not
contain more than one or two more cartridges, and he had no more in
his pockets. This was the conclusive touch. He turned and walked back
toward the sea, not without a sense of nervous expectancy, and a quick
readiness to look back.
But nothing molested. He passed his old camp, where the fire still
smoldered, went down to the foot of the glacier and climbed over the
piled snow into the valley. From the beach he saw dimly a series of
yellowish lights at no great distance. He hailed, and an answer came
instantly in Morrison’s deep voice.