Page:Weird Tales v01n02 (1923-04).djvu/112

Rh enings to chambers lighted with flickering flames of green or yellow. Once Roberts looked, his flesh acrawl with morbid curiosity. He saw within the place three sprawling things of rags and decay, things which did not—perhaps could not—move. Thereafter he kept his eyes averted, and clenched one fist about the solid butt of his revolver.

After perhaps ten minutes of travel, Bowen. wheezing audibly now, bent forward in a silent convulsion which brought blood to his lips. Only at the last did he make a noise. Then a gasping inhalation was not to be controlled.

A second later he crowded back against Roberts, crouching at the side of the passage. A leap a dulled groan  Bowen had brought down the butt of one of his borrowed revolvers upon the skull of a newcomer whom Roberts had neither seen nor heard!

A moment later they squeezed through another narrow opening, descended a flight of block stairs, and were in another corridor—one much more populous than the upper, to judge from the sounds. Roberts heard the subdued chattering of many voices. Here faint light showed.

Bowen led on hurriedly. At a point indistinguishable from the rest of the wall, so far as Roberts was concerned, he pushed inward a block of stone, which went to the horizontal, immediately swinging back when they had passed.

"Now we're all right for a minute "began" began [sic] Bowen. His long-repressed coughing attacked him then and he surrendered to it for the time. "Lungs filling up won'tlast long " he gasped then. "This corridor no way out  get back in the other, if I am not with you"

"We'll manage that don't you worry!" answered Roberts. "Lead me first to those two men. After that, the Buddha I feel unclean already!"

Bowen incomprehensibly laughed at that—a shrill giggle, half-hysterical. But he led on, of a sudden turning, squeezing through to the second corridor again, and then, without warning bringing up two automatics. Two streams of fire four shots

"Got 'em all!" he shrilled, laughing. "Come quick now!"

OBERTS found himself dragged forward at a half-run.

Again Bowen's two guns spoke. This time, in the light of flashes, Roberts saw two crouching things succumb. Through a black doorway they plunged. Then a faint light from a single insufficient wick lighted a chamber perhaps twenty by ten feet in size. Chained, backs outward, Porterfield and Christensen were spread-eagled against the fetid, oozing wall!

They were stripped to the waist. Across their white backs, greenish now in the light of the floating wick, were the red criss-crosses of flagellations.

"Thank God you've come!" cried the usually silent Christensen, as Roberts shot away the rusted chains binding his arms and ankles to the wall. "This place do you know what it is?"

"All about it!" answered Roberts, succinctly. "Here, take these!" He handed a brace of revolvers and a handful of clips to his Norwegian comrade.

Then he turned to Porterfield. Four explosions, and a series of wrenches set free the boy, who did not wait to have the dangling shackles shot off his wrists and ankles.

Bowen, stationed at the entrance, was shooting now. A gathering handful of Yengi crowded in the passage. These threw lances, or cut at the defending figure with knives that were long, keen and curved.