Dick raced up the rope ladder, and jumped into the hollow where Hal and Father Juan lay in a tangled heap. They were both breathing, but knocked unconscious. He propped them up and loosened their clothing. In a few seconds Hal opened his eyes.
“Thank the Lord you’re all right, kid,” he said.
“And you, Hal? Where does it hurt you?”
“Sore all over, but I don’t think any damage is done,” answered Hal, making an effort to sit up.
He felt his chest and sides carefully.
“Ouch! There’s a rib broken! But that’s nothing— how’s the padre?”
“All right,” answered Father Juan feebly. “A cut on the forehead and all the wind knocked out of me, but plenty of fight left. … Heavens, Ricardito!”
Dick looked more badly hurt than any of them. He had nothing solid on him but his belt, from which shirt and shorts hung in shreds. His skin was black and caked with blood, his own, Echegaray’s, and the beast’s. But as a matter of fact he had suffered nothing worse than a varied assortment of cuts and bruises.
“Don’t worry about me, padre,” he said. “I’m a bit dirty—that’s all. Let’s see to Don Ramon. His arm’s half off.”
The three scrambled back on to the rock. Father Juan tucked up his cassock, and painfully let himself down the ladder.
“Hola, the padre!” said Pablo with a pretence of cheeriness. “Can you help me get him up?”
Father Juan looked at him keenly.
“You’re hurt, too, Pablo,” he said.
“Never mind me! Help me with Don Ramon! Quick!”
Pablo lashed Echegaray to a plank. Then the other three hoisted him on to the rock by the derrick. He was pale as death and unconscious. They carried him out to the daylight, and laid him in the ox-cart with a pile of hay under his body. The oxen grazed undisturbed. The sun shot down through the oak leaves, pencilling warm shadow patterns on the turf. To Dick the sunlit valley seemed utterly unreal, compared to the horrible struggle that had been fought out under its surface. He felt that weeks had passed since he last saw it, and that it had no business to remain so peaceful and unchanged.
Father Juan leaned over Echegaray, fixing the tourniquet above the severed artery, and changing the red sash for a clean linen bandage.
“You did a good job, Pablo,” he said.
There was no answer. He looked round. Pablo had not yet come up from the boat. Hal and Dick, instantly alarmed, dashed back into the cavern. Pablo lay crumpled up on top of the rock. The last of his strength had been used to drag himself up the rope ladder.
“He never said he was hurt!” cried Dick desperately, as if he could have helped Pablo had he only known.
“Help me to get him on my back,” said Hal. “I can’t lift but I can bear a weight all right.”
He carried Pablo out of the cave and laid him by the side of Echegaray. As he did so, blood poured from one of the fisherman’s heavy sea-boots. There was a ragged hole in his calf, from which a sliver of steel protruded. Father Juan extracted it, and disinfected the wound. The pain shook Pablo out of his faint. He tried to get up, accompanying his struggles with a blast of oaths.
“Lie still, great brute,” ordered Father Juan jovially, “and cease to blaspheme the saints who have saved your worthless carcase! How long ago did this happen?”
“Same bomb that got Don Ramon,” answered Pablo. “There was a lot of it, caramba!”
Echegaray stirred feebly on his bed of hay.
“Ricardito. …” he murmured.
“All’s well, old friend,” said Father Juan, holding some water to his lips.
“No. No. Not well. … Ricardito. … I swore that no harm should come to him.”
“He’s all right,” replied Father Juan gently. “Look at him.”
Echegaray raised his head.
“You’re bleeding, Ricardito!”
“Not much,” said Dick. “Most of it isn’t mine.”
“Whose is it, then?”
Dick didn’t answer. He looked at Father Juan for instructions.
“Is it mine?” asked Echegaray.
“Yes,” said Dick unhappily.
“Mine,” murmured Echegaray. “Mine. … We’ve mingled our blood, Ricardito. I thought you might do. And fate—fate is quite sure you’ll do. I accept you.”
He lapsed into the Basque tongue.
“He’s light-headed,” whispered Father Juan.
“I’m nothing of the sort,” said Don Ramon in a surprisingly firm voice. “Nothing of the sort! Have any of you thought of warning Olazábal that the beast’s loose?”
They had not. They had all forgotten the little Erreguiña cruising off the coast.
“Who can go?”
“I’ll go,” said Dick. The padre and I are the only ones who can run, and the padre’s wanted here.”
“Good boy!” whispered Don Ramon, exhausted by his burst of energy. “It’s up to you. You and Olazábal, you’ll be in at the death.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
DICK trotted down through the trees into the open, and then lengthened his stride. At first every step cost him a twinge of pain, but as the muscles of his body settled down to a steady run, he was only conscious of the rush of warm air past his face, and the brushing of the grass against his shins. Though he did not know it, he had caught the spirit of the born fighter—the spirit that takes discomfort and the possible loss of comrades as a matter of course, and only looks forward to the objective to be won. Swerving around the clumps of bushes, and vaulting the low walls in his course, he crossed the little plain and began pounding up the slope that overlooked the sea. Where the blue of the horizon faded into haze hung the smoke of a liner, passing carelessly along the well-travelled sea lane from Coruña to Bilbao. Probably there was not a man aboard her to whom the distant coast was anything more than a strip of white on a chart.
Off the Cave of the Angels rocked the Erreguiña. Dick could see that her crew were alert and excited. On the bridge Olazábal was steadily searching the coast with his glasses. There were look-outs in the bows and in the stern. She had a full head of steam up.
Olazábal spotted Dick the moment his head rose above the sky-line.
“Hola! Que pasa?” he yelled, his great voice carrying the third of a mile which separated them as clearly as if he had been at Dick’s side.
Dick waved to him to stand in. The Erreguiña turned and began foaming towards the shore.
“What’s up?” repeated Olazábal, as soon as they were close enough for Dick’s voice to carry.
“Watch out for yourselves!” called Dick. “It’s got away!”
“We’re watching,” came the answer. “Anyone hurt?”
“Yes,” Dick shouted. “Take me aboard if you can.”
Erreguiña’s dinghy splashed into the water, and Olazábal was rowed in shore by one of his crew. Dick clambered down to the sea to meet them. He jumped as the boat rose on a swell, and tumbled safely into the bottom.
“How high did you go?” asked Olazábal, observing Dick’s blackened body.
He hid his concern under an air of mischievous amusement, in the way of men who live among risks and cannot afford to take any disaster too seriously.
“High?” asked Dick, puzzled.
“When you blew yourselves up.”
“We didn’t go up,” Dick explained. “We had to bomb the brute when he was right on us. Echegaray and Pablo were hit by the bits.”
“How badly hurt?”
“I don’t know,” said Dick, shaking his head.
“Por Dios! As bad as that!” Olazábal exclaimed. “We’ll finish that murderous brute, Ricardito!”
“Echegaray said it was up to us,” replied Dick simply. “Have you seen the thing?”
“No,” said Olazábal, “but it’s out.”
He pointed to a faint brown stain on the water.
“That was a patch of blood,” he said. “It was red ten minutes ago. I’m glad it’s the beast’s blood—I thought
perhaps it was taking one of you for a journey out to sea.”
“Which way did it go?” asked Dick.
“We couldn’t tell. All we saw was that blood oozing up to the surface. We’ll pick up the trail if we can. Tell me the whole story as we go.”
The dinghy scraped against the side of the Erreguiña. Olazábal hoisted Dick on board and pulled himself up after. The crew swung the boat into its cradle on the half-deck, and stood by for orders. They had considered up to this moment that their captain was indulging a whim to go hunting some large and doubtful game of the sea. That much Olazábal had told them. But now, with the battered Dick before their eyes and the news that Echegaray and Pablo had become serious casualties, they saw that their quest was really dangerous, and began to take an interest in it.
“East or west?” asked Olazábal. “Any opinion, Ricardito? Or shall we toss for it?”
“Let’s go west,” said Dick.
“Why?”
“Well, we might look around Offering Key. Echegaray said that once upon a time the beasts went ashore there.”
“This one,” objected Olazábal, “has never seen Offering Key. Its great-grandfather wasn’t born when the people sacrificed there—if they ever did.”
“Still, it might go there,” Dick insisted, “just as birds and fishes find out for themselves the same places that suited their ancestors—though they can’t have heard anything about them.”
“He has a head on him, this youngster!” exclaimed Olazábal, and spat over the side as if to call the waves’ attention to it.
He put the helm down. The Erreguina’s bows rose and dipped through a quarter circle till they pointed towards Offering Key and the mouth of the Villadonga river.
“Full speed ahead!” ordered Olazábal. “Port and starboard watches, look out for blood on the water! I’ll give five dollars to the man who reports it first.”
Dick stood by Olazábal on the bridge and told him rapidly the bare outline of their adventures. The captain accepted without question his account of the size and shape of the creature they hunted, but his imagination boggled at the blue algae and the shoals of fish which fed on them.
“But, chico!” he roared in protest. “If that’s true I’ll plant them on the mud-banks of Zumaya harbour and never go to sea again!”
“I suppose you could,” said Dick. “But you’d have to plant them in their own mud, and see that the sun only strikes them once a day.”
“Man! I’ll give them each an umbrella!” said Olazábal.
“Blood on the starboard bow!” yelled a hoarse voice.
Olazábal snapped the glasses to his eyes. A patch of scum, crimson and cream, was heaving up and down on the swell quarter of a mile ahead.
“Half speed!” he ordered.
Then he placed the three naked bombs on a locker within easy reach of his right hand.
“Pedro—to you the five dollars!” he said to the seaman who had spotted the patch of blood. “And now watch with better eyes than ever, or you won’t live to drink them up.”
He turned to Dick.
“Ricardito,” he said, “we must be right on his tail. That blood is fresh.”
Fifty fathoms ahead of them, a wave broke for no apparent reason. The dull green of the water showed that some large bulk was lurking just beneath the surface.
“Full speed!” roared Olazábal.
He changed course. Erreguiña darted for the shadow, and deliberately rammed it. Her blunt, purposeful bows crashed down into the hollow of a sea, while the men aboard her, each clinging to whatever was nearest his hand, braced themselves to meet the shock. But the boat plunged smoothly forwards. Whatever had been in its path had silently submerged before the onrush.
Olazábal reduced speed and cruised to and fro, waiting. Three times they saw the darkness under the water, but no sooner had they changed course than it vanished, leaving only an ooze of blood on the surface. Suddenly ten feet of tail lashed out of the sea ahead of them. The black scales shone like mirrors in the sun. Olazábal and his crew gasped with astonishment. The power in that sleek, thick tail gave them a pretty clear idea of the size of the creature that owned it. Again Erreguiña butted into the swell a little ahead of where the tail had been, but hit nothing.
“Pretty play!” exclaimed Olazábal coolly, borrowing a metaphor from the bull ring.
He meant that their enemy was baiting them as a skilful matador plays the charging bull.
“Yes,” said Dick. “But we’re a bull of fierce breed.”
“Fierce,” remarked Olazábal, jamming the helm up so suddenly that Erreguiña heeled over at an angle of forty-five degrees, “is right!”
They rushed a shadow, and felt a shudder run through the boat as the keel lightly touched some obstruction.
“If he starts playing to the gallery like that,” said Olazábal, “he’s going straight to hospital!”
They hovered cruising around the floating islands of blood, but saw no more movement in the water. Then slowly and warily they resumed their course towards Offering Key. Evidently the reptile had decided that it would take no more chances with this clumsy but fearless enemy. They had to trust to luck again, and hope that the brute had not turned back on his traces.
Offering Key squatted low on the water a mile and a half away to the west; a grey, flat rock, melancholy and dangerous in time of storm, but delicious on a calm autumn day, when the sun struck sparkles of gold from the stone, and the cool water invited the bather to glide in and out of it like a diving bird. There was a patch of orange in the centre of the rock. Olazábal, thinking it might be more blood, raised his glasses to his eyes. He dropped them almost instantly, and looked at Dick. The knuckles of his great hands turned white as he nervously tightened his grip on the wheel. In his grey eyes Dick saw fear for the first and only time.
“What?” Dick asked.
“La condesita,” answered the captain. “That’s her in an orange swimming suit. She’s been bathing off the Key.”
He turned to speak to the engineer hidden behind the boiler. His voice was cold and steady, quite unlike the hearty roar with which he usually passed the orders to his one-man engine room.
“Friend,” he said, “give her everything you’ve got! Get us alongside Offering Key within five minutes!”
“I’ll shake the engine loose if I do,” answered the engineer.
“Shake it loose!” said Olazábal.
The engineer never argued with Olazábal. His only reply was a brief turn of the wrist; it sent the Erreguiña racketing through the water. The sweet thudding of the engines gave way to a mad vibration, as every loose rivet and washer danced to the tune of the racing pistons. Dick and Olazábal stared at the Key as if their straining eyes could bring it closer. They were not watching Lola nor the rock, but the water that lapped against its low, sheer sides. The captain tooted his siren to attract Lola’s attention, and she stood up and waved in reply. Like the rest of the village, she thought that they were still engaged in charting the depths of the underground channel, and had no idea that they had discovered its secret.
“Recristo!” swore Olazábal. “Look, Ricardito!”
They had picked up the trail again, now when they least wanted to see it. The Erreguiña was running past one of the familiar patches of blood.
Two minutes passed. They were still not quite half-way to Offering Key. The third minute was an eternity. Dick and Olazábal stood side by side with set faces. A plate started from its bed in the engine pit, and added its infernal rattle to the din. Dick suddenly realised that he was gripping a bomb. Unconsciously he had picked one up the moment he saw Lola in danger. He had grown rapidly accustomed to the use of those steel balls.
There was still a minute and a half to go before they could ease up alongside the Key and take Lola aboard. Then at the edge of the shore, just afloat, appeared a dark object. Every man on the Erreguiña tried desperately to believe that it was an orange box or a lump of seaweed. It swung up a little hi
gher on a wave, and the sun glinted on two eyes and the dull surface between. The head rose wearily out of the sea. It seemed horrible that the long neck should straighten so slowly while the Erreguiña shuddered with speed. There was a flurry in the water as the beast swung its tail to gain momentum. The paddles smacked on to the flat Key, and it flopped ashore—fifty feet of torn, scaly bulk flopping over the hard rock. They could hear it above the racket of the engines.
Lola stood. A slim, orange-clad figure, her black hair floating on her shoulders, she stood and watched. When the head first came hovering over the edge of the rock, she all but fainted; she would have done so, had she not realised in the same instant that this was why the Erreguiña was tearing towards her, and that the men on board all knew of her danger. She did not think of running. She had never run away from anything that was solid and could be seen, for she and her ancestors were as much a part of this land as the trees that grew on it; they feared nothing it could produce. Staring straight in front of her, she watched the giant body bounce on to the rock and bounce again. The flippers smashed down on either side of her, heaving forward a blank wall of scales and muscle, which pumped back and forth with the beating of the heart; she did not see the flat head which hovered over her, as if hesitating whether it was worth while to strike at this lonely, bright object.
The Spanish Cave Page 10
