The Adam Chaser/Chapter 11

EFRESHED, Abington awoke with a sunbeam shining fair in his eyes. Just at first he failed to orient himself and thought he was in the cave with Bill. But this cavern was larger and the crevices high up on the wall, between the broken masses of rock, let in a westering sun and a breeze straight off the desert. He was hungry again and the salt beef had given him a burning thirst.

He wondered if Bill had returned while he slept. It was quite likely, he thought, and having no wish to be discovered just yet, he crept very slowly from his place of concealment, careful to keep in the shadows beneath the jutting wall.

For some time he waited and listened, but the only sounds he heard were the tinkling of the little spring and the shrill chirping of a few cedar birds that had made their home in the crannies of the roof and were very busy with their own small affairs.

Abington grinned to himself as he cautiously approached the little pile of supplies and began a more careful investigation than he had attempted that morning. Two pounds of chewing tobacco—most convincingly had Bill bewailed the loss of those plugs, he remembered. He counted half a dozen cans of corned beef, one of the variations in diet which had been made possible by having three pack burros. Had Bill really imagined he could make Abington believe that the gosh-awful had carried off chewing tobacco and corned beef in cans?

In the face of their loss of the burros Abington had not given much thought to the missing articles from Bill's outfit. He had visited the cave, viewed the apparent aimlessness of the demolition, had looked for tracks, and, having found the giant sheep tracks in the bottom of the cañon, paid no more attention to the wreckage.

“Bill must have hurried back across the valley after this stuff—no, certain details contradict that,” Abington said to himself. “He must have carried all this stuff on his back, along with what I gave him. Not very bulky—he could have concealed it all in his pack, easily enough. Pretty heavy load it would make! No wonder Bill was grouchy! Took advantage of the gosh-awful's work and held out a few supplies on me. Clever—but then, the sheriff's experience with Bill should have warned me to be on the lookout for tricks.”

Abington helped himself to what food he could stow in his pockets, dined on another can of corned beef, took a long drink at the spring and refilled his carbide lamp before he started out again. His plans had changed altogether since he discovered the food cache.

He no longer wanted to get back to the cave where he and Bill had camped, for he did not believe that Bill would be there, nor any of the supplies, and if there were fossilized human skeletons in this region he felt that he would find them just as easily without Bill.

The way out of this particular cavern led him down through another crevice, blocky and splintered as if the whole peak had been twisted asunder; and for the greater part of the distance it was open to the sky.

There were places where it would even have been possible for a man to climb up out of the crevice. But the day was too far gone and Abington had no intention of spending another night underground in aimless wanderings, nor to roost on some dangerous pinnacle until morning.

He emerged at last on a narrow ridge that stood like the crest of a huge, petrified wave between the peak he was leaving and another not quite so high. Intuitively he identified it as the ridge he had dubbed the rooster's comb—and knew that if he were right he must have come a long way underground. For the cave where he and Bill had spent the night together and from which he had started on his subterranean journey was considerably more than half a mile from the ridge where he had seen the light.

Again the high peaks were gilded with sunlight while the lower slopes glowed scarlet and the deeper shadows merged into warm purple. No artist would ever have dared to mix those barbaric colors, even for a desert sunset; and if he had dared his hand must have lacked the cunning of the Master Painter who daily wrought his magic here on these wild hills where men so seldom ventured.

Abington looked down a sheer wall of rock to a deep basin where grass grew and a round pool of water held like a mirror the rose-tinted reflection of the cloud straight overhead. One steep trail led down the farther hillside to the pool and as he gazed a mountain sheep went bounding up that trail. On the brink of the pool stood a man foreshortened to the height of a boy. He seemed to be staring after the sheep.

“Bill! Oh, Bill!' Abington shouted between cupped hands, For the moment he had quite forgotten Bill's treachery, in his human reaction to the sight of a familiar figure after the ordeal he had just passed through. “Oh, Bill! Hey!”

The man's face was upturned, staring. Then he raised his rifle and fired point-blank at Abington. The bullet struck a rock close by, ricochetted and nicked Abington across the forearm.

“You poisonous reptile!” snarled Abington, and whipped out his automatic.

At his first shot the figure went sprawling; tried to get up, fell back and lay still, Abington watched him, a bit heartsick over the excellence of his shot. He had never taken much to the manly sport of planting leaden pellets in living bodies, but since his work took him into the wild places of the world he had learned to shoot straight because it seemed to him a necessary accomplishment. Besides, straight shooting made an enormous saving in ammunition,

“You would have it,' he grunted remorsefully. “Any jury would agree that my life is of more use to the world than yours—and since you are the killing kind it”

Down in the basin the wounded man struggled to hands and knees and began crawling; slowly, stopping every moment or two, going on, crawling in an aimless circle most horrible to watch.

An oath voiced at random jarred out of Abington's throat. He half raised the automatic, lowered it, shook his head. He couldn't do it. But neither could he leave man nor animal crawling blindly, aimlessly around until he died. Abington looked again and turned away sickened at that creeping, groping, stricken thing hemmed in by the crimson rocks that rimmed the basin.

ITHOUT any clear purpose Abington started down the ridge, looking for some break in the cliff that separated him from the basin by a scant two hundred feet. He had no doubt that Bill Jonathan was done for; the automatic was a wicked weapon; the range was short.

When in the dusk he came slipping and sliding down an old sheep trail long since abandoned for a more favored path, however, there was no wounded man to be seen in the little basin. Like a shot quail that flutters for a moment among the bushes and is lost, the man somehow had managed to crawl away and disappear.

Abington called Bill's name again and again while he lighted the carbide lamp. And as the white light sprang out and drove back the shadows, a gunshot roared just under the cliff for answer to his hail.

As he leaped sidewise, Abington shut off the lamp, then rushed the spot where the gun had flashed. By good luck he spied the vague bulk just as the rifle was being painfully lifted for another shot. He snatched at the barrel and wrenched the gun free—by the feeble resistance of the other gauging shrewdly his waning strength.

“Venomous kind of snake, aren't you?” Abington observed with pitying contempt, as he leaned the rifle against the cliff and started to relight the lamp.

The light flared up. Abington stooped, gave a shocked exclamation as he started back, recovered himself and stooped again. The man was not Bill Jonathan, but a gaunt old fellow with high cheek bones and a straight gash of a mouth drawing an evil line through his grizzled beard. He was a total stranger, wounded and collapsed against the cliff; beaten and utterly passive now, like a trapped animal that will not move unless it sees some chance of escape.

“By Jove, I'm glad it wasn't Bill, at any rate!” Abington ejaculated as he knelt to make a superficial examination. “Shot through the side,” he diagnosed to himself. “Well below the heart. Serious enough, but by no means fatal with the proper care—and that is going to be something of a problem in existing conditions. Might better have made a clean job of it—glad I didn't, though.

“Well,” he asked aloud, “where's your camp? If it doesn't involve too much climbing I'll try and get you home.” He waited while the old man's eyes remained fixed on him with a baleful stare. “Doesn't understand, maybe.”

He tried French, German and a passable Italian, keenly watching the eyes that never once changed their homicidal glare. He sat back on his haunches and studied the glowering face with less personal emotion than he would have displayed before an odd pattern of the Maya death mask, and decided that the man had understood his first question well enough and was merely stubborn.

“Of course, if you want to lie here all night, that's your privilege, I suppose,” Abington said finally, standing up and glancing around at the confining walls of the dusk-filled basin. He turned the light again on the old man's forbidding countenance, made more sinister by the pain he was suffering.

“Are your field glasses equipped with night lenses?” Abington asked abruptly, and silently laughed at the startled wavering of those colorless eyes.

“Thought so! Now, since you do understand plain English, let me urge you to tell me where I'll find your camp. Of course you have one, for you're too well nourished and too well dressed to be living off the country. You won't talk? Then you are likely to catch cold in that wound, lying out here all night. And I can assure you that a bullet wound—especially in the body—can give plenty of trouble if neglected.”

The thin, vindictive mouth, clamped shut in that thick unkempt beard, might have been dumb for all the sound that issued from it.

BINGTON rose and went seeking here and there with a light hoping to discover some sign of a camp, or at least a trail that would lead to one. He did not succeed, but he did find the field glasses which had been dropped or cannily hidden tinder a bush, where they might have been overlooked if the light had not brought a reflection from the lenses. He was looking them over when, from up on the ridge where the sheep had disappeared, a voice that could belong to no man save Bill shouted anxiously:

“Hullo! That you down there, professor?”

Abington swung the lamp toward the sound, moving it three times up and down, the signal to advance which they had found convenient in old caves and tunnels where a shout might bring down upon their heads a small avalanche of loose rock.

“Was that you shooting? You hurt?”

“Come on down, Bill,” Abington called. “There's a path, if you can find it in the dark.” And as an afterthought, he added: No, I'm not hurt.”

Good old Bill, to ask that question with just that demanding note of worry in his voice! Abington remembered what he had been thinking when he pulled and aimed his automatic, and he had the conscience to blush for the thought. Of course Bill was no traitor! His eager, hurried voice betrayed long hours of frantic searching in that maze of narrow gorges that twisted and turned and criss-crossed so bewilderingly.

Abington smiled under his beard as he listened to the clattering of small rocks on the hillside beyond the pool. Presently Bill Jonathan's familiar figure—never had Abington seen a more welcome sight!—came lurching into the light zone, half running, with that little swing of the shoulders that told of strength.

“My Lord, professor, I've been runnin' these hills like a rabid kit fox, lookin' for you!” he panted, laying both hands on Abington's shoulders and giving him an affectionate shake or two. “Why, you old vinegarroon, I've been scared to look off a cliff or into a pot hole for fear I'd see a coyote sneakin' away from your ornery carcass! Thought sure that gosh-awful thing had got you!” He stopped to breathe. “Who was doing that shootin'? You?”

Abington nodded, a bit surprised at the lump in his throat which prevented speech.

“Shootin' at the gosh-awful? You git it?” Bill's voice dropped to a vengeful whisper as he sent a wholly involuntary glance behind him.

“No, Bill, I didn't. Some one down here took a shot at me and I shot back. He's lying over here by the cliff.”

“Yeah?” Astonishment pulled Bill's hand off the other's shoulder. “Who do you reckon Was it an officer?” An indefinable change had crept into his voice.

“No, I don't think so. He isn't dead yet. Come over and take a look. We'll have to do something—get him into a shelter of some kind. These nights are too chilly for a wounded man to lie out unprotected.”

Once more Abington was calm and cool and efficient. He turned and led the way back to the wounded man, Bill Jonathan following at his heels quite as if there had been neither quarrel nor separation to jar them out of the routine of the trail.