Page:Stirring Science Stories, March 1942.djvu/17

 OLF had lost all count of the days. For many weeks they had roamed the desolate tree-clad canyons of Northern Arizona and Southwestern Utah searching for men like himself. They found weedy cultivated fields in hidden box canyons and the clean-picked bones of men and women about the ashes of dead fires beside the empty walls of nearby cabins.

The Four Corners were as empty of human beings as in those ancient days when only Navajos ventured into that forbidding rocky wasteland.

Often they went hungry and water did not touch their lips for days. Rolf's beard was matted and long and his body was covered with ill-cured hides against the biting cold of the canyon nights. He carried a stout bow now and a butcher knife of hammered iron that he had found in one of the empty log huts.

So at last they stumbled quite by accident upon the entrance to a deep canyon, walled about with an unbroken line of sheer red and yellow cliffs. The rusty overhanging rim-rock seemed to close in overhead until but a slender ribbon of blue split through their twin walls to light the tree-lined stream bed. The crumbling eyeholes of an ancient cliff-dwelling stared down at them from the red ruin of the southern cliff.

The smell of snow was in the air. The bitter Utah winter was at hand and the protected shelter of the hidden valley was welcome. Welcome too was the sight of several warm log cabins and a central stone building where, in its deep cellar, they found plentiful stores of dried foods and grain.

"Here we stop," announced Rolf.

"It is good," agreed Jek. "Better a spear in the eye than the cold."

"If we cannot live in the cold," laughed Rolf,", " [sic]neither can your people."

"That is right," nodded Jek emphatically. "We are safe here."

But that night the sound of light footsteps brought Rolf upright from his blankets. Closer to the crude bed of poles and laced rawhide thongs did they come. His muscles tensed; his fists knotted hard, and suddenly he launched himself on the intruder.

He felt soft flesh and the rough texture of coarse cloth beneath him. A startled moan of utter terror and pain whooshed out of the intruder's lungs at the moment of impact. This was no little man! It must be a Moster!

"Jek!" he shouted, "throw wood on the fire. I've caught a uggh!"

Something heavy and uncompromisingly hard crashed down upon his skull and he rolled dazedly away from this second unseen assailant. Numbly he fought upward from the uneven hewed planks of the floor until his widespread feet were beneath him.

Jek threw a handful of dry twigs on the hot coals in the great fireplace. Flame flared up and in the indistinct half-light Rolf could see two shadows that moved swiftly away toward the cabin's inner room. Steep wooden steps led down from that central room into the narrow cellar. They must have entered there; the outer doors were double-barred and thick.

He was upon the escaping pair in a single mighty bound; spun