HOW HAVERLY CHECKED THE STAMPEDE.
FOR half an hour the fugitives raced on, every muscle straining in a
mad effort to outdistance their pitiless pursuers. Their feet seemed
shod with lead as they turned and twisted among the boulders; their
breath came and went in great, panting gasps that shook their bodies,
yet for all their frenzied endeavours, their relentless enemies drew
nearer. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the wolfish creatures gained upon
them.
Then, in the grim wall of cliffs upon their left, appeared the
dark mouth of a canyon.
“Quick!” gasped the Yankee; “in here with you!”
Like a flash the fugitives turned, and--with what was almost
their last effort--plunged into the great cleft that split the
range of hills in twain. Six yards from the entrance they swung round
and stood at bay, Seymour and the millionaire fingering the triggers
of their rifles.
Some time passed, but there came no sign of their pursuers; even
their howls had ceased, and the three grew puzzled to account for the
strange silence. It was not natural! They knew the character of the
wolf-men too well by this time to think for a moment that they had
given up the pursuit--had abandoned the chase! What could be the
meaning of their sudden silence?
“They’ve got some devil’s card up their sleeve,” Silas muttered.
“I guess they ain’t gone dumb all of a sudden for nothing. Say,
there’d be no harm in prospecting a bit further along this gully? If
there’s no back entrance, we’ll be in a darned awkward position.”
“You’re right,” assented the baronet. “Mervyn, if you’re in want
of a feed, you can peck a bit as we go along.”
Cautiously they crept along the canyon, pausing occasionally to
listen for any sound of their foes. But the underworld might have been
deserted for all they could hear. Never had the silence been more
profound.
The cliffs on either side rose steep and inaccessible as the wall
of a house. Not a crevice or foothold of any description presented
itself in the face of the towering walls. As straight were they as
though the hills had been split asunder by the stroke of some giant
sword. Here and there, at the base of the cliffs, grew a solitary
fungus or a cluster of puff-balls, the weird, bloated forms of these
latter betraying nothing of their terrible explosive power.
For an hour, perhaps, the three men moved forward, plunging
deeper and deeper into the heart of the hills, and still there came no
sound from the wolf-men. They had almost begun to
believe--incredible though it seemed--that they had shaken
off their pursuers. What else could be the meaning of their
inaction?
Had they known of the _coup_ which, even then, the crafty
Nordhu was preparing against them, they would have lost little time in
making their way out of the gorge. As it was, they took their ease,
resting at intervals during their journey. Their future movements they
had not decided upon, their time being fully taken up with the
exchange of their experiences.
The loss of the _Seal_ seemed to the professor an
overwhelming blow.
“We are lost indeed without the vessel,” he remarked
gloomily.
“I guess if there’s a road out of these infernal regions, we
shouldn’t ha’ struck it with the _Seal,”_ was Haverly’s sharp
answer; “but that ain’t the trouble at present. You say you’ve seen
nothin’ of Garth?”
“Not a sign,” was the reply.
“Wal, that’s a licker! Say, Seymour, what do you make of it?”
“He’s either been murdered by the savages or else he has
escaped,” answered the baronet.
“Put your money on the last of them two; I calculate they’d
hardly be likely to knock him on the head, seeing as how all prisoners
are reserved for spider-meat. Anyway, we’ll assume he’s got clear,
though what he’ll do now the _Seal’s_ gone, Heaven alone
knows!”
“What of Wilson?” asked Mervyn suddenly.
“When we know his fate,” returned Seymour, “the mystery of the
_Seal’s_ disappearance will be a mystery no longer.”
Hereafter silence fell upon the trio. Each man’s thoughts were
busy with the things of the future. Would they ever find a way out of
this underworld, or were they doomed to wander in its ghostly wilds
until death released them? At the moment their prospect was not an
alluring one!
Without any settled plan for the future, save to put as great a
distance as possible between themselves and the wolf-men, they seemed
helpless. Haverly’s active mind revolved all the expedients which
presented themselves, yet, even to him, the case seemed almost
hopeless.
“Say, professor,” he cried, breaking the long silence, “ain’t you
got----”
His sentence was never finished, for at that instant, from far
behind, came a series of hideous yelps. Softened by distance though
they were, the sounds were frightful enough to the ears of the
fugitives.
“They’ve struck our trail again,” remarked Seymour, stopping for
a moment. Then a puzzled expression passed over his features, as a
low, rumbling roar, not unlike far-away thunder, rolled up out of the
distance, accompanied by a further series of wolfish cries.
“I opine we’re going to strike trouble very shortly,” averred
Silas, “though I allow I don’t hardly tumble to the meanin’ of this
yer rumbling.”
Quickly the rumbling grew into the pounding of giant hoofs, and
the ground shook beneath the fugitives’ feet.
“A stampede!” the baronet cried. “The devils have stampeded a
herd of animals! Run for your lives!”
But his friends needed no urging. They ran as men with the fear
of death upon them, gazing eagerly to right and left in hope of
finding some cave or cleft in the cliffs in which they might hide.
But never a crack or a crevice appeared in the iron walls, and
ever the pitiless thunder of the great hoofs drew nearer. It seemed as
though nought could save the ill-fated trio from the vengeance which
the devilish priest had designed for them. Then, almost at the last
moment, an inspiration flashed into Haverly’s mind.
He pulled up short, and, drawing his sheath-knife, sprang to
where grew half a dozen or more huge puff-balls. Three of these he
detached, handling them with great care. Carrying them out into the
very centre of the gorge, he piled them in a heap.
His friends had stopped their flight as they noted his strange
actions, and now stood watching him, Seymour admiringly, Mervyn with
blank astonishment depicted on every feature.
“You’re a genius, Silas!” exclaimed the baronet, as, under the
American’s orders, they placed a safe distance between themselves and
the puff-balls. “I should never have thought of that.”
“But surely,” Mervyn began, “you don’t mean to say that those
things are explosive? Why----”
“It was one of them same that bust the elk-hunters we told you
about, anyway,” retorted the Yankee, his voice almost lost in the
thunder of hoofs.
The next instant a dozen huge forms loomed through the twilight,
racing three abreast down the gorge. The foremost of them were almost
upon the fungi pile, when Silas and the baronet fired, their shots
crashing simultaneously into the puff-balls. A dazzling sheet of flame
leapt high above the pile, illuminating for a moment the great shaggy
bodies and huge curved tusks of the stampeding animals.
“_Mammoths!”_ gasped the scientist.
His exclamation was drowned in the shrill trumpeting of the
terrified pachyderms, which was drowned in turn by the thunderous roar
of the explosion as the puff-balls did their work.
The fugitives, flung violently to the earth by the shock, were
scarcely conscious of what followed. The ground rocked furiously
beneath them, creating a violent nausea, which left them sick for
hours; immense masses of rock, torn from the face of the cliffs by the
frightful force of the explosion, crashed heavily into the gorge, and
above all the terrible uproar rang the shrill screaming of the dying
animals.
But the din ceased at length, and then the three comrades
staggered to their feet. Badly shaken they were, but otherwise they
had received no hurt, and they gave thanks as only men can who have
escaped from the very jaws of death.
The vengeance of the high priest of the wolf-men had failed!
“I guess we scored that time,” Silas said; “but I’m sorry for the
tuskers. It was real cute of the niggers to stampede the brutes.”
“Thanks to you and the puff-balls,” put in Seymour, “the trick
didn’t work.”
Mervyn had not yet recovered from his stupefaction at the
marvellous explosive agent which was hidden away in the quaint fungi;
but when he did at last find voice he could scarcely find words to
express his wonder.
“It passes all belief,” he cried, “that such curious growths
should have so deadly a power! They are natural bombs!”
The scene of the explosion entirely bore out this statement. The
gorge was completely blocked by an enormous mass of _debris,_
still quivering flesh and rock splinters being mingled in sickening
confusion. Of all the herd of monster quadrupeds not one had escaped
annihilation.
Turning, the three friends strode forward on their way, Mervyn
dilating as they went on the subject of the explosive fungi.
“I guess them niggers’ll be considerable riled,” Haverly asserted
with a chuckle, breaking in on the scientist’s discourse. “It ’ud be
almighty elevating to see the old priest’s face when he knows we’ve
pulled through an’ that his trick’s gone bust.”
“The fellow possesses terrible power,” Mervyn returned. “He
almost succeeded in hypnotising me, though I struggled against him
with all the force of my will. I tremble now to think of what might
have happened had he effected his purpose.”
“Great Scott!” Seymour ejaculated. “Though I only saw him from a
distance, it struck me that he had remarkably weird eyes, but I never
imagined that the fellow was a hypnotist. We must fight shy of him for
the future.”
“I guess it’s goin’ to take us all our time,” drawled the Yankee.
“You can gamble on it the old man’ll lose no time in gettin’ on our
trail again.”
“You think he’ll pursue, then?” queried the baronet.
“Think!” Haverly repeated. “I guess we can put it stronger than
that. It’s a dead cert. the galoot’ll be on our trail again within a
couple of hours, an’ then there’ll be a circus.”
“The heap of _debris_ may check pursuit for a time,”
suggested Mervyn.
“It may,” was the dubious reply, “but I doubt it. I calculate if
you could pile the hull range of the Rockies way back there it
wouldn’t stop them wolf-men for more than a second or two. Their
shanks seemed to be built of watch-springs. Anyway, with that old
priest urgin’ ’em on, it’ll be little short of an earthquake as’ll
check ’em. What the blazes is that?”
A scream rang out through the silence, menacing and terrible.
“Vampires!” cried Seymour, and examined the breech of his rifle.
As he snapped to the lever an immense vampire dropped swiftly downward
through the twilight. On the instant the baronet fired, and the brute,
lurching, recovered itself with difficulty, and flapped out of
sight.
“Whatever was it?” gasped the scientist, amazed at the vast size
of the creature, of whose shape he had caught but a fleeting
glimpse.
“A vampire,” Seymour replied; “the same kind of brute that
attacked Silas and me as we were returning to the boat.”
“I had forgotten for the moment,” returned Mervyn. “What terrible
brutes they are! Who would have dreamed that such creatures existed?
Truly this----”
“Jupiter! If this don’t lick all! I guess we must ha’ struck a
blamed cemetery!”
There was good cause for the Yankee’s interruption, for, rounding
a curve of the gorge, the adventurers had come suddenly upon a valley.
On either hand towered monster fungi, their unearthly radiance making
the valley as light as day; and between the growths the ground was
thickly covered with bones.
Everywhere the bleached and ghastly relics lay, a veritable
harvest of death.
The bones were, for the most part, those of animals, but here and
there among them a human skull grinned up mockingly at the
intruders.
“What can it mean?” the Professor asked in a hoarse whisper,
stepping cautiously amid the gleaming piles.
“I assume this is the feedin’ ground of the vampires,” the Yankee
answered. As he spoke there was a rustle amid a fungi-clump some yards
away, and a huge, black form emerged, to flap heavily away into the
shadow of the surrounding cliffs. Parting the fungi, Haverly peered
down at the spot whence the creature had arisen.
Lying with outstretched limbs, its ghastly outline revealed with
hideous distinctness by the glistening growth around, was the carcase
of a wolf-man.
But something else caught the Yankee’s eye. In the hand of the
savage, tightly clenched in the stiffened fingers, was a white
handkerchief!
A whistle of astonishment escaped Silas. What brought the
wolf-man with that in his possession? Kneeling, Haverly forced open
the hand of the dead savage, and, removing the handkerchief, held it
out for the inspection of his friends.
“It’s Wilson’s,” cried Seymour. “See, here are his initials,”
pointing to the letters, “T. W.” embroidered in one corner. “How the
dickens did it get here?” he continued.
“Perhaps the savage had something to do with Wilson’s
disappearance?” suggested the scientist; but Haverly shook his head.
He was busy trying to figure out the puzzle, which as yet defied
him.
“I allow it beats me,” he admitted at length. “What brings the
engineer so far from the coast?”
“He may not have been here at all,” Seymour replied.
“I guess this handkerchief ain’t walked here!”
“What about the savage?” persisted the baronet.
“You can gamble on it as he picked it up. Say, has it struck you
as bein’ kinder peculiar that we should find the nose-rag in this yer
valley?”
“You mean?” interrogatively.
“Have the vampires had anything to do with it?”
“Heaven forbid!” cried Seymour; “the thought’s too horrible!”
“We shall see,” the Yankee answered as they moved on again.