DEAD HOLE
The race up the canon was far different from the terrible flight of the
previous day and the misery of the night. The cool spring water had been
very refreshing, lofty cliffs shadowed the canon bed from the hot
morning sunrays, and the pain of Lennon's lacerated hand had eased to a
dull ache. He took turn about with Carmena, riding and running.
The canon bottom was fairly smooth. For more than an hour the fugitives
raced up the great cleft between the towering precipices and past narrow
side canons. At last they came to a break in the sheer walls. The cliff
on the right leaned back in a series of terraces that formed a broken
giant stairway to the top of the mesa.
Carmena led the pony up a sloping shelf ledge. The line of ascent picked
out by her practised eye proved unexpectedly easy. As they climbed in
steep zigzags from terrace to terrace Lennon trailed behind. Carmena
noticed his frequent glances down into the canon bottom.
"Don't worry," she said. "They didn't rush the canon mouth--they
crawled. If any circled and climbed the mesa, the side canons cut 'em
off from us. We'll beat 'em to the Hole."
"The Hole--we'll find help there?" queried Lennon.
"Slade is away. But I figure we'll be safe enough, once we get in.
There's Dad and--my sister."
"If they are at all like you, Carmena!"
The girl paused on a ledge to gaze down at him with a somber, clouded
look that brightened into a tender smile.
"Elsie is as much like me as a lily is like a cactus. No thorns about
_her_. She's cuddlier than a kitten. Eyes bluer than forget-me-nots,
Jack; hair yellow as corn silk. She's only eighteen and sweet as honey."
"I'm picturing an angel," bantered Lennon. "Your father must be a fine
man to have two such daughters."
The flush in the girl's tanned cheeks deepened. But the soft glow of her
eyes faded and left them dull and haggard.
"Dad's been unlucky all 'round," she murmured. "Not his fault, either.
He came West for his health--almost died--one lung gone."
"Hard lines," sympathized Lennon. "Ranch work can't be easy for a sick
man."
The girl climbed to another terrace before she replied:
"That's not the worst of it. Slade came six years ago--when we were
starving. Dad got in with him. He can't break loose. If only we could
get away, Dad would be all right."
"Yes?" said Lennon.
Carmena remained silent until he came panting up after her to the top of
the steepest ascent. While he paused to catch his breath she opened the
canteen. They were by now badly in need of a drink. Before starting on
up the ledges she met Lennon's smiling gaze with a look of tremulous
appeal.
"Dad used to be a lawyer," she faltered. "If only you'll try to like him
and--and help."
"Of course!" exclaimed Lennon. "Aren't we pals? You're pulling me
through this scrape. Perhaps I can pull him out of his hole. You called
it Dead Hole, didn't you?"
"Yes," murmured the girl. "That's the name and--it fits."
"You've stood by me. I'll stand by you," Lennon pledged himself. "We'll
look for that copper mine together. I'm working for a big copper
syndicate. If I relocate the mine I am to receive twenty thousand in
cash and ten per cent. of the stock. Your half of the cash should pull
your dad out of his hole."
The girl's eyes dilated.
"Don't--don't tell Dad!" she gasped. "It's not the money I want. You
don't sabe. Promise you won't say a word to Dad about the money--or the
mine?"
"Why, if you do not wish me----"
"Not a word--not the barest hint! Promise!"
"Very well. Only----"
"You'll learn all too soon!" she murmured, and she started quickly up
the last ascent.
When they rounded the brink, twelve hundred feet above the canon bed,
the girl did not linger to talk. She dropped the pony's reins and
started off at a jog across the hot, level, cedar-dotted top of the
mesa.
Lennon galloped ahead of her, tied the pony, and ran on afoot. Carmena
copied the maneuver. In this manner, taking turn about, they covered the
ground almost as fast as if both had been mounted. As each drank from
the canteen at every stop and Carmena twice wet the nostrils of the
pony, none was yet exhausted when, at the end of five or six miles, the
girl headed down into a quickly narrowing valley.
The funnel-shaped trough pinched to a steep chute between precipices
that leaned closer together overhead the deeper the fugitives descended.
The bed of the narrow mountain crack became even more steep. In places
the pony had to jump like a goat down five and six-foot ledges. Time and
again he slid on his haunches. At the worst place of all the beast was
saved from certain destruction only by snubbing his horsehair picket
rope around a corner of rock and so easing his descent to better
footing.
But, as Carmena remarked, the steeper the grade the sooner it was ended.
They came down into the bottom of the lower canon, bruised and exhausted
but with no bones broken.
"Almost there," panted Carmena, and she reeled ahead along the
boulder-strewn bed of the chasm.
At the second turn the cliff ended in a vertical slit-glare of sunlight.
The pony whinnied. Carmena led the way out into an oval cliff-walled
valley, two or three miles long and half as broad.
First to strike Lennon's desert-starved eyes was the vivid grateful
verdure of irrigated cornfields. Beyond, in browning hay meadows, grazed
a herd of cattle and twenty or thirty head of horses. Three quarters of
a mile to the left, in a cavity forty feet up the rock wall and well
under an overhang of the towering precipices, nestled a group of stone
ruins.
Lennon pointed toward the ancient buildings.
"Cliff dwellings, I take it."
"Yes--I told Elsie to be ready with the ladder. We'll make it in time
for the call of Cochise."
Before Lennon could inquire the meaning of this, she sprang upon the
pony and loped along the cliff foot toward the cliff ruins. As Lennon
jogged after her he saw a rope ladder slide down the under cliff,
followed by a rope reeved through a crane that thrust out from another
opening in the facade of the cliff building.
Carmena's saddle and bags, saddle blanket and rifle, and the
canteen--all were fast to the hoisting rope when Lennon came staggering
and panting up beside the girl. She pointed toward the head of the
valley and caught the rifle from him to tie it on the load.
"A miss is as good as a mile," she said. "We'll just have time to get
up. Cochise and Pete must have ridden over around and come down Hell
Canon. Ours was Devil's Chute."
Lennon frowned at the pair of riders who were racing swiftly down aslant
from the head of the valley.
"We'll be ready to pick them off," he said. "There's no cover under
here."
"Too late for that," sighed Carmena. "Dad won't let us.
Besides--Pete----"
"But when the murderers have tried to kill you!--And they'll steal all
his cattle."
The girl winced and looked down.
"No. You see Dad--he is friends with all the--Indians hereabouts. I'll
be safe enough now, soon as Cochise cools off. It's only a question of
you."
"I see!" exclaimed Lennon. "You know the renegades. You would have been
safe at the first. You have risked your own life just to save mine. I'll
never forget that, Carmena."
"If only--if only you'll remember--when you know!" she whispered, and
she turned to start up the rope ladder.
As Lennon stepped forward after her he noticed that the saddle load had
already been hoisted above his reach and was rapidly going higher.
A rope ladder draped upon the face of a smooth rock wall and unfastened
below is at best not easy to climb. Lennon had to crook his right elbow
through the rungs to get any use of his injured arm. But the riders
racing swiftly across the head of the valley would soon be within short
rifle range. Lennon's left hand was only a few rungs below Carmena's
boot heels all the way up the ladder.
At the top the girl pulled herself in over the worn stone sill of a
massive-walled doorway. As Lennon scrambled up and through the deep
entrance after her he glimpsed a thin gray face, with bleary red eyes
and loose lips, leering at him out of the darkness of an inner room.
To the right, a little way back from the next opening, a small
fair-haired girl was rapidly winding in on a miner's windlass. She
stopped to tug at a rope. The crane swung around into the entrance with
the saddle and rifles.
Carmena had already faced about to haul the ladder up the cliff. Lennon
caught hold with his left hand to help her. They had gathered in less
than ten yards when a bullet whizzed between their heads and splattered
on the stone wall at the rear of the room. Carmena hooked the ladder
over a peg at the side of the doorway and forcibly dragged Lennon out of
the opening.
Two more bullets whizzed in, one of them angling up close over the sill.
Had it come a moment sooner Lennon must have been struck. Carmena's hand
shook and her voice quavered, though she sought to speak in an
unconcerned tone:
"That's warmer than I expected at this stage of the game. Guess Cochise
is feeling pretty bad in his heart. We'll have to let him cool down
awhile."
"Why not return his compliments?" suggested Lennon. "We can easily pick
off both of the devils without exposing ourselves."
"And get the rest of the bunch down on us! No, Jack, they've got us
holed up. We might slip away before the others came but they'd make a
clean sweep of the stock and everything else. Come and meet Elsie.
Cochise will soon tire of wasting cartridges."