PETER'S BOULDER
There was no twilight in Homolobi. Buried beneath the jutting
overhang of the Western cliff, the village was plunged in darkness
the moment the sun had sunk behind it. One minute I looked through
the narrow doorway of our room and saw the gaunt figure of the
serpent priest, our sentinel, limned against the gray house-walls
across the temple plaza. Then the enveloping gloom had swallowed
him. Only upon the distant Eastern cliffs of the valley a few
crimson beams clashed harshly upon the painted rock strata, flickered
courageously--and vanished, too.
But immediately other lights flared up. The plaza, whence rose--had
risen this hour--a continuous hum and buzz of comment, of a sudden
glared with torches. More torches shone on the opposite house-roofs,
and from the unseen depths of the valley at the foot of the Breast
blossomed a great flower of light that grew and grew, accompanied by
a muted roar of savage voices, dissonant, unrestrained.
The voices of Homolobi were stilled--as though Wild had suppressed
all with one wave of his feathered paho. The village became wrapped
in the silence of death. And now our ears could hear distinctly that
gritting insanity of frenzied noise, rising and falling with the
leaping of the flames that streaked hundreds of feet into the air to
illumine the darkness beyond the village walls. They were faint, far
away, but the savage insistency of their chorus was unescapable, even
when the hum of the village began knew.
"The Awataba," I muttered, more to myself than to the others.
"_Ja_," assented Corlaer. "Der bowmen are madt. Dey go crazy, eh?"
Tawannears said nothing. He had not spoken in the hour which had
elapsed since the serpent priests had driven us from the plaza.
Until the light failed I had been able to see him sitting motionless,
with his back to the wall, his eyes staring into vacancy. Now, I
suppose, he occupied the same position. At any rate, I could not see
him.
"If we had but a pound of powder and ball between us," I groaned.
"What use?" replied Corlaer. "If you kill all der people in Homolobi
we hafe still der Awataba."
"No use," I admitted. "Yet I like not the thought of dying in a
trap."
"We will not be deadt alone," the Dutchman grunted. "_Ha!_"
His exclamation was caused by the soft tread of a foot in the
doorway. I jumped to one side, drawing the knife and tomahawk from
my belt.
"Into the open!" I whispered.
But Kachina's voice answered me, the sibilant Spanish just loud
enough to reach my ear.
"Quiet! 'Tis I."
I extended my arm and clutched her feather garment.
"Alone?" I whispered.
"Yes. Let me in. I-- Where is Tawannears?"
The Seneca's voice came from the darkness at my elbow.
"Tawannears is here, Gahano."
The throb of gladness in it sent my heart leaping into my throat.
There were tears in my eyes.
She understood him.
"Tell him," she ordered me, with a tinkle of musical laughter, "my
name is Kachina."
"She is Gahano to me," was Tawannears' answer.
I felt her press by me, and a moment later her voice reached me
again, strangely muffled.
"What I am called matters little," she said. "I think Wiki lies when
he says I came from Massi. I seem to remember a time many years ago
when I often saw people who were white like you. But that does not
matter. Tawannears is a man! And I am tired of priests and their
ways. Ay, a man who would travel as far as Tawannears for a woman is
a man!"
"We shall all of us go soon upon a longer journey," I returned
significantly. "And you, too, if you stay here."
"Yes," she agreed, her voice still muffled.
I thrust out my hand and found her body in Tawannears' arms.
"What!" I gasped in astonishment.
Tawannears laughed softly--and at that note, contented, caressing,
Peter, also, indulged in a peal of low laughter.
"Dot's funny," he squeaked. "We come all dis way, andt Tawannears
gets her, andt we die quick."
"What did the fat one say?" inquired Kachina, wrenching herself from
the Seneca's embrace.
I told her.
"Yes," she said a second time. "Death is coming. That is why I am
here. The Awataba told the council they must have you to sacrifice.
They said they dreamed that your lives would appease their gods, but
I think that ant Kokyan planted the idea in their heads. I would
have said so, but Wiki would not let me, and so I ran away."
"What will the council do?" I asked helplessly.
The hum of the village and the blurred voices of the bowmen at the
foot of the Breast rasped through the night.
"They will give you up. Kokyan said there should be no argument. It
was sufficient sign of your harmfulness that the Awataba were so
emboldened. And when Wiki argued against it, the Bowmen said they
would lay waste the valley, even though they all perished for it.
Then Angwusi joined with Kokyan, and I spoke as I said."
"Hark!" said Peter.
From the plaza came a bellow of voices.
"The council is ended," exclaimed Kachina. "They are coming."
"A few of them will die," I answered grimly. "You had best go."
"Old fool!" she retorted contemptuously. "You have no wits. They
will block up the doorway, and break in upon you from above. You
have no chance here."
"Then we will go out into the open."
"No, you shall come with me. I know a way. It is dangerous in
daylight, and perhaps we shall all perish; but if we gain the
cliff-top we can hold our own. Come! I will lead Tawannears, and do
you others follow him."
We moved softly out the door, and she guided us along the wall of the
temple's upper story. Here was black night, unmitigated, for the
overhang of the cliff shut out even the star-shine. We had passed
two other doorways, as I could tell by feeling with my hands, the
uproar in the plaza becoming deafening in the meantime when there was
a patter of feet and torches blazed across the terrace. Men streamed
by us, indistinct running figures, and we flattened against the wall,
trusting to the shifting shadows to conceal us; but a group of a
dozen or more with torches made the night brilliant as day.
A yell announced our discovery. There was a rush that we stemmed
with ready steel, and Kachina cried:
"Run! Do not stay to fight!"
We won a brief respite by our efforts; and she dived into a nearby
doorway, and we found ourselves tumbling down a steep stair that
twisted on itself and debouched into a vast chamber which we
recognized as the temple. Already men were pouring in from the
plaza, Kokyan at their head, a torch waving in one hand, a knife in
the other. And behind us the restricted stair echoed the shouts of
our immediate pursuers.
Kachina ignored Kokyan, and guided us past the tank before the empty
altar of Massi, in which writhed the reptile guardians of the shrine;
but Kokyan sped around the other, and shorter, side of the temple.
The foam was dripping from his jaws; his eyeballs were staring from
their sockets. And as he saw Kachina turn toward a doorway that
showed dimly behind the altar he shrieked with fury and hurled his
torch at her. It would have struck her had not Tawannears reached
out and caught it as expertly as he was used to catching the
tomahawks thrown at him in practice by his warriors.
An instant Tawannears held the flaming club of resinous pine-wood.
Then he sounded the war-whoop of the Iroquois that is dreaded by
white man and red from the Great Lakes to the Ohio, and sprang
forward to meet the Priest of Yoki. They came together beside the
tank of snakes, but Tawannears refused to close, backing away in such
fashion that the priest was poised on the very verge of the tank,
from which arose an evil tumult of hissing as the snakes responded to
the confusion above them.
Pursuit and flight were stayed for the instant by the spectacle of
this struggle. Moreover, Peter and I guarded the space betwixt the
opposite side of the tank and the temple wall, and no man, not even
the snake priests themselves, cared to try to leap that gap.
Kachina, smiling unconcernedly, her feather raiment rising and
falling steadily with her even breathing, stood, with hands on her
hips, in the doorway behind the tank, watching the contest of the two
men for her. If she had any feeling of concern she covered it
effectually.
Kokyan howled a curse at the Seneca. Tawannears replied with a smile
as unconcerned as the girl's and the priest stabbed at him
desperately, with all the strength of his body behind the blow.
Never moving his feet, Tawannears swayed his shoulders to avoid the
knife, and struck sideways with the torch he held in his left hand.
It smote the priest on the thigh as he was off-balance, and Kokyan
tottered and fell--into the squirming midst of the tank of snakes.
Tawannears, without a word, tossed the torch after him, and a bedlam
of angry hisses responded. Looking over my shoulder, I shuddered at
what I saw.
The Priest of Yoki was submerged beneath a tempest of coiling
monsters tortured by the flames of the torch and excited by the
unusual light and noise. I had a vision of triangular heads that
darted back and forth, of fangs that dribbled venom, of slimy,
twisting lengths that coiled and uncoiled and coiled again--and under
them all a shape that quivered and jerked and called feebly and was
still.
I turned and ran, Peter at my heels. The Dutchman's flat, impassive
face was a study in horror. Myself, I experienced a nausea that left
me weak as I staggered behind Tawannears into the doorway before
which ordinarily stood the idol of Massi. Kachina's figure flitted
ahead of us, unseen, but notified to our senses by the echo of her
feet and low-voiced directions as we came to turns or steps up and
down in the course of the passage. And close after us sounded the
hue and cry of the pursuit, a confused clamoring of people driven mad
with hate.
Indeed, 'twas the stimulus of their hatred flogged me back to
self-control. At a corner in the passage, with a glimmer of light
beyond advertising its emergence upon some opening, I gripped Peter
and bade him stop.
"We must fight them back," I panted. "They do not expect--we shall
gain time."
He crouched next me, our bodies blocking the way, and the leaders of
the pursuers, rounding the turn at a run, crashed full upon our
knives. We flung the two corpses into the mob that pelted after
them, slashing and hacking with knives and hatchets in the half-light
of the torches, until we had reared a barricade that gave us an
opportunity to resume our flight with a trifling lead--for men
hesitated to cross the battered heap we had left behind us. Yet we
were no more than a dozen paces in the lead when we broke from the
passage into a courtyard deep in the cleft of the cliff. In front
and overhead towered the peculiar bulging rock formation which
protected Homolobi from assault from above. The cliff-top mushroomed
out so that it overhung the Breast, and leaning against its base was
a double ladder from which Kachina and Tawannears waved us on.
I could not see what use it was to climb to some rock-lodge where we
would be picked off in daylight by archers on the temple roof, but
there was no time for argument with that yelping horde on our track.
Peter and I raced across the court, and rattled up the hidebound
rungs as fast as we could go. There were men on the lower rungs
already when we stepped upon a narrow shelf where the girl and
Tawannears awaited us.
"Come," she said nervously in Spanish, and plucked the Seneca by the
hand.
"Waidt," shrilled Peter solemnly, and he seized the ladder-ends in
his huge paws, swayed them tentatively and gave a shove.
The ladder teetered erect on end, poised as if to drop back against
the cliff--and went over backward, spilling its load of priests to an
accompaniment of fearful screams.
"Now we got a better chance, eh?" commented the Dutchman.
Kachina chuckled with amusement. She had adopted our side
unreservedly. The death of these people who had lately almost
worshiped her distressed her no more than the slaying of the Awataba
in the pass.
"That was a good blow for the fat one," she remarked. "They will set
up the ladder again, but we shall have more time, and that means
everything."
"How?" I questioned, as I strove to discern a way of escape from the
scanty foothold of the rock-ledge.
"I will show you," she answered. "This is a secret path of the
priests. Wiki used it when he went into the desert to commune with
Massi. But it is very dangerous, and you who are not accustomed to
climbing the rocks will have to go slowly. That is why I say the fat
one did well to overthrow the ladder. Before they dare to set it up
again we shall be able to climb beyond their reach."
She took Tawannears by the hand. He led me, and Peter brought up the
rear, and we edged cautiously along the shelf, blessed by our
blindness in that we could not see how perilously near eternity we
walked. Some twenty feet from where the ladder had rested the ledge
terminated in a series of foot- and hand-holds ascending a slope, and
these we climbed by touch. In that pitch darkness 'twas impossible
for one to see the others ahead of him. But we hurried, for behind
us we heard the ladder creaking back into place.
The third stage of the path was another ledge, which carried us into
a remarkable crevice in the face of the cliff, a kind of natural
chimney, evidently a fault in the rock structure caused by some
bygone disturbance of the earth's surface. In the crevice it was
darker than it had been outside, if that was possible; but the
footing was more secure, and we were spurred on by the sounds of our
pursuers, better accustomed to such work than we and consequently
making twice as rapid progress.
The path was made easier by occasional foot-rests chopped by the
priests and by ladder-rungs braced in holes. It trended at first
directly into the heart of the cliff, then turned at right angles and
ascended diagonally, following a layer of soft rock which I could
readily identify with my hands. In two places it was so steep as to
demand progress by means of straddling. Atop of the first of these
funnels it widened to become a chamber littered with rock fragments,
and a beam of moonlight filtered into the somber place revealed a
jagged crack along the side toward the valley.
Peter, following me up the second funnel, muttered he could see one
of the priests climbing the slant of the path to its beginning, and
in my energy to make way for him I deluged him with pebbles and fine
gravel. This upper end of the crevice was very brittle, perhaps
because it had been long baked in the heat of the sun, and we slipped
and slid continually, losing a foot for every yard we scaled. But at
last Kachina achieved the top, and helped Tawannears up, and betwixt
them, they hauled up Peter and me.
To our surprise, we discovered ourselves to be on the summit of the
cliff. Homolobi, of course, was hidden beneath the protuberance of
rock that ran eastward many feet from where we stood. Beyond it,
though, we could see the full sweep of the valley, dotted with the
fires of the Awataba, the silver glitter of the moonlight on the
river and the opposite wall of cliffs. The night was very bright and
clear, the sky gemmed with a myriad stars, the moon shining full
between draperies of purple velvet.
"What now!" I asked.
Kachina shook her head.
"We must keep back the priests from following us," she said. "If we
left the path they would soon be close to us again."
"And if we wait," I returned, "they will send back messengers to
guide the Awataba here by some other trail. Perhaps they have
already done so."
"True," she agreed coolly. "Well, so far I have planned for you. It
is time you took thought to save yourselves."
I translated this to the others, and Peter strode instantly to an
enormous boulder, lying on its side in a bed of shale.
"We put a cork in der bottle," he announced.
He leaned his shoulder against the boulder, heaved and it rolled over
toward the head of the funnel. Another heave and another, and it
rested on the funnel's lip. Peter shoved it with his right arm,
there was a shower of gravel, a startled yelp from the bowels of the
rocks, and he turned to us, with a broad grin.
"_Ja_, dot's a goodt----"
I thought the end of the world had come. Deep underneath there was a
heavy jar, then a sullen, sky-piercing roar that resounded and
reëchoed, pounding our ears, dazing our senses, louder, ever louder,
swelling and bursting into prodigious thunder-peals. A dense cloud
of dust rose like a curtain around us. The rock on which we stood
jumped as though it had been struck with the hammer of a god. The
roar slid off into a declining repetition of earth-shocks. The dust
settled slowly. And we looked from a sheer precipice at our feet
upon what had been Homolobi.
Peter's boulder, bounding down the funnel in the cliff, must have
encountered a fault in the rock, possibly the jagged crack I had
noted above the first funnel, and with the momentum it had gathered
and its accompanying wave of small stones and gravel, had started
forces which had torn from the face of the cliff the overhanging
projection which had shielded Homolobi from attack for centuries.
This mass, in falling, had planed off the top of the Breast, and was
now a sloping hill of rock fragments which stretched far into the
valley.
Under it lay the people and the houses of Homolobi, their storehouses
and choicest gardens and most of the Awataba, who had gathered close
to the foot of the Breast to await the issue of their demands. It
was the most utter, tragic ruin I have ever seen. The dust clouds
seethed above the wreckage like the smoke of successful fires, but no
fires could have been so successful. There were not left even ruins
or ashes. Homolobi was abolished. It was gone without a trace to
show where it had been.
Kachina cast herself at Tawannears' feet.
"How mighty are your gods!" she moaned. "I am yours. Save me from
them."
Tawannears lifted her in his arms.
"Gahano need have no fear," he said proudly. "Tawannears' medicine
is strong. All who oppose him shall perish. But Gahano is safe.
Surely, Hawenneyu has us in His keeping that he should visit such
destruction upon our enemies! He will send the Honochenokeh to guard
us. Tharon the Sky-holder will let the clouds fall upon those who
stand in our way. Gaoh will blow the winds against them.
Tawannears' orenda will triumph over all!"