Driscoll looked to see no dirt had fouled his rifle, and beckoned the sailors.
“Look for tracks!” he ordered.
“My own guess,” he said slowly, as the men scattered, “is that you’ll find plenty of survivals. And that you won’t like them half as much as you think.”
Tracks were easy to find in the light of day. A half dozen men reported them, and in a little while the trail was resumed. It still led along the stream, but the land now sloped downward.
“The mist is thickening,” Jimmy complained.
“Thickening!” Denham said. “Look there!”
A hollow lay ahead of them. The stream ran into it, and where the hollow sank deepest the morning mist had become almost a cloud of fog. In the midst of this, they heard a splashing.
“Think it’s him?” Denham said.
“We’ll find out,” Driscoll cried, and raced ahead.
He was waiting in exasperation at the water’s edge when the others caught up with him. Beside him was a fresh footprint not yet filled with water although that seeped quickly into any depression made on the bank.
“He got across,” he said, and waved to the stream which widened almost to a small lake in the hollow. “We’ve got to swim.”
“That’s out.” Denham shook his head. “We can’t swim with guns and bombs.”
“Then we can do better,” Driscoll said and pointed to two logs resting against the shore. “We’ll build a raft.”
“Good!” Denham agreed.
“All right, boys,” Driscoll called. “We’re going to ferry over. On a raft.”
The sailors nodded, but before they could spread out to hunt for more logs and for stout, pliable vines to use as ropes, Driscoll beckoned them soberly.
“Here’s something you ought to know,” he said and briefly told of the conclusion he and Denham had drawn after studying the beast just slain. “This may be more than you bargained for,” he ended. “If anyone of you wants to go back, now’s the time to shove off.”
The men looked at one another. Finally Jimmy put a question.
“You say that maybe we’ll want to back out because we’ve never seen any of these big lobsters? Is that the idea?”
Driscoll nodded.
“Well!” Jimmy said with a pleased glance at his bombs, “they haven’t seen us either. That makes it fifty-fifty. I guess we’ll stick.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Everybody worked at top speed, Driscoll fastest of all. He dared not risk the moment’s idleness which would enable the suppressed picture of Ann as he had last seen her to push too far forward into his mind. He had another reason, too. Denham was plainly waiting for an opportunity to say how he blamed himself, how sorry he was. Driscoll felt he couldn’t bear that, either.
The raft was finished quickly. There were vines in abundance, and the half score of logs they required were easily found; this lagoon-like widening of the stream seemed a catch-all for everything that fell into its waters farther up.
“How deep do you think it is?” Driscoll wondered.
“Not over ten or fifteen feet most of the distance,” Denham guessed. “But from the way the grass disappears in the center, and the stillness of the water there, I think we may hit a pot-hole going down to the mines.”
“We can paddle a little then.”
Veiled in the still perceptible mist, the sailors clambered carefully aboard, each with a pole in addition to his rifle. There was scarcely room for the last man. He managed to get on only by the narrowest fit.
“Don’t get the guns wet,” Denham warned.
“Oke!” said Jimmy for them all.
“All set?” Driscoll looked around.
“Setting pretty!”
“Watch those bombs, Jimmy!”
“Ain’t I watching?”
“All right! Shove off.”
They were away with a jerk and a clumsy roll that all but toppled the hindside men into the water. These were saved by their poles and presently were shoving with cautious earnestness along with the others.
Everyone was suddenly dead sober. The fog; a reaction from the forced bits of jocularity at the start; the thought of Ann, which was almost as heavy a weight upon the minds of the sailors as upon Driscoll’s, all helped to darken their mood. The raft was no very tractable craft, either, and the problem it offered helped to lower their spirits.
“Easy now,” Denham said. “ ’Ware the balance. Don’t let her swing.”
One edge of the raft went awash.
“Keep your weight toward center,” Driscoll cautioned. “Well toward center.”
They were in the middle now, and as Denham had predicted the poles found no bottom; not even a hint of one. It was necessary to use them as paddles, and this added to the danger of capsizing. The poles were badly balanced, and any sweeping movement that had real force behind it tipped the raft ominously.
“I think I see weeds ahead,” Driscoll said. “We’ll find bottom there. What’s that?”
The stern of the raft had scraped over something. A knob? The upward jutting end of a water-soaked log?
“Christ!” Jimmy burst forth.
A strangled raging bellow followed close upon the blow, and then, a little astern, reared a great scaly head and a section of a great scaly body.
“Dinosaur!” Denham exploded. “By the Power! A dinosaur!”
His tone was a mingling of consternation and the triumphant excitement of discovery.
The monstrous apparition threw the men into a panic. Paddles swung wildly. Only their unlooked for arrival in shallower water, where the poles served as props, saved the raft. Even at that it tilted precariously and one man was pushed off. By luck his hand closed on a trailing length of vine-rope and he dragged along behind, slowing the flight.
The huge head curved to the water and dived. A broad scaly back rose to the surface; then it, too, vanished.
“Push!” Driscoll ordered swiftly. “It’s trying to come up under us. We’re nearly there. Everybody, now! Heave-ho!”
The last pound of power went into a few final, desperate thrusts. Ten times the power, however, would not have made their speed equal to that of the great shadow which moved swiftly beneath them. They were still a fair stone’s throw from shore when the raft took a tremendous blow from underneath.
“The bombs!” Denham shouted. “Save ’em, Jimmy!”
Jimmy was barely able to save himself; and Denham’s tardy snatch for one of the missiles missed, although he had dropped his rifle in the effort to secure it. Everyone was thrown violently into the water. The raft itself was torn into its ten original parts. One of these toppled on the head of the man who had been towing astern. He went under heavily and did not reappear.
The others struggled toward shore like scattering sheep.
Well in the lead, Driscoll threshed forward at a racing pace. Already he had headed to where he might again pick up the trail of the beast god. Denham, a good waterman himself, was next. A little to the left went Jimmy, minus his iron burden at last.
The half-emerging dinosaur still lurched among the fragments of the raft. The tremendous blow it had struck, the veiling mist and the shower of logs had brought a short confusion. Except for that, few of the men would have got away. As it was, all save one were scrambling over the far bank when the beast’s head cleared. That one, the beast sighted and to him it gave chase in a series of lunging, elephantine strides.
Driscoll paused at the water’s edge long enough to give a hand to Denham and Jimmy and one or two more, and with these as a nucleus swung left at a dead run calling to the others to follow. As they ran, the ground ascended and the mist disappeared.
Driscoll came finally to a high narrow crest beyond which the ground sloped again down to a wide morass. It was a soft, blackish expanse with here and there areas where t
he surface had hardened under the sun and cracked into great slabs. Denham, joining him, stared at this and interpreted again as he had interpreted the appearance of the dinosaur.
“Asphalt!” he said. “An asphalt morass that was there before the first beast came into being. A sink of hell! There’ll be thousands of carcasses buried rods deep in it. If we try to cross, Jack, we’ll have to be careful we don’t stick and sink, too.”
Driscoll nodded and turning around shouted a loud summons.
A curious phenomenon lay in the direction of the stream. Close by, clear sunlight flashed upon the brush and the wet faces of men who came breathless up to the rendezvous. Farther back the steeply descending ground was covered by the mist which hung motionlessly there in a deep layer thick enough to cast a veil over everything. Through it, as through thin white smoke, more of the party struggled up toward the crest. Driscoll began counting these distant survivors and then the others closer at hand.
“Look!” Denham cried.
Following his pointing hand to the far side of the valley out of which they had climbed, they saw a single figure, dwarfed by distance to less than quarter size, racing violently toward the trees. It was the last man. He had taken the wrong direction, and behind him lumbered a giant, huge headed pursuer.
“Stand fast!” Denham cautioned as Driscoll stepped impulsively forward. No one, he pointed out, could get there in time, and the others, gathering around, made that plain by their rigid immobility.
The midget managed to get to a tree, and by a miracle of despairing strength climbed into its lowest branches. The dinosaur paused beneath and reached its vast mouth up with a seeming slow care.
“Hasn’t anybody got a gun?” Denham asked furiously.
“They’re all at the bottom of the stream,” Driscoll muttered.
“If we only had one of them bombs,” a sailor cried, “we could run back and maybe do something yet.”
“I had to let them go to keep from drowning,” Jimmy stammered.
“That was a lunkheaded trick,” Denham told him. “You could have saved a couple.”
“You lost your gun.”
“Come to think of it,” Denham admitted with a wry grin, “I did.”
Except for the sheath knives which Driscoll and several of the sailors carried, no weapons remained.
They all stared again across the valley. Through the mist the dinosaur’s grotesque head reached up, until only a threadlike strand of light separated it from the man’s body in the tree. A thin, distant scream drifted to their ears. Head and body merged. The little group upon the crest drew closer to one another. One of the sailors turned suddenly and violently sick. Another would have burst in fury down the slope toward his comrade but Denham tripped him up.
“We’ll go along,” Driscoll said, and turned back to consider the problem of the asphalt morass. “Scatter out, you men, and see if you can pick up a footprint.”
He, himself, felt sick from wondering how many of the crew were to go before they caught up with Kong, and how many afterwards. Thinking of the beast-god, his mind called up the picture he had seen in the frame of the altar’s pillars. The picture was so vivid that at first, as he gazed across the morass, he thought that what he saw was simply imagination. The shouts of the rest told him otherwise; the picture was real.
The beast-god they sought was lumbering toward them from the center of the asphalt field. Monstrous beyond conception, as hairy as any of the simian creatures of an African jungle whom he resembled in all but size, the fact that he picked his way with a slow, almost human caution, made him all the more incredible.
Incredible, too, was the care with which he bore Ann. His primitive brain valued this strange possession for reasons it could not understand. Much as a prehistoric woman might have cradled her baby, he carried the girl’s inert form in the crook of one arm. Almost, the watchers would have sworn, there was purpose in the way his broad back was interposed between his captive and the vast pursuing beasts which plodded inexorably behind, doggedly wresting their great feet from the suck of the asphalt.
These obviously were still more of the gigantic creatures which had survived on Skull Mountain Island from a forgotten age. Huge, four-legged things they were, with thick short necks and short heavy heads ending in horns. There were three horns on each head, short, pointed weapons which shook implacably after Kong.
Both Kong and his pursuers were so intent upon one another that the watchers on the crest had gone unnoticed.
“Down!” Driscoll commanded. “Down!”
All flung themselves behind the concealing mask of some bushes.
“If we only had our bombs!” Denham groaned.
“What are those brutes?” Driscoll asked.
“Tri—” Denham hesitated over the word he knew well enough but had spoken probably never, having always been content to leave it in the book in which he found it. “Wait a moment. I have it. Tricerotops.”
“And what are they?”
“Just another of Nature’s mistakes, Jack. Something like a dinosaur. But with their forelegs more fully developed. They got their names from the three horns on their heads.”
The pursuit had drawn closer to Kong. He stood now on a dry mound in the center of the morass. He had put Ann down on the far side of the mound, away from the tricerotops. The farthest behind of these was apparently out of the fight, and out of all other fights as well. It had lumbered into a spot too soft to walk upon and was speeding its own end by fruitless struggles. The other two, however, were almost at the edge of the mound. Luckier than their companion, they had picked out dry paths and were sure to reach their objective. Already Kong was carrying on a long distance fire. Great slabs of the hardened asphalt swung up over his snarling face and went hurtling down upon the tricerotops’ horny heads.
“No!” Denham said as he watched. “I won’t believe it. There never was a beast as strong as that.”
What amazed him, and all the others, was the power with which Kong cast his huge projectiles. One, striking fairly, broke off a horn. The tricerotop staggered, obviously hurt, and Kong redoubled his attack. The second of the two beasts swung grudgingly off to the flank and retreated slowly toward the watching group on the crest. The first also tried to retreat, but another missile hit it again on the head and it fell. Kong roared in triumph and beat his breast.
“We’ll have to get out of this,” Driscoll said. “Creep back through the bushes.”
Off to the right, through a fringe of trees, could be seen the rocky edge of a narrow, stark ravine; and at one point what looked like a fallen log led to the seeming safety of the far side. Driscoll pointed, and they all began sliding away.
The ravine invited for a second reason. Kong, still roaring his triumph, had picked Ann up and was moving off. His course bent at an angle which, it seemed to Driscoll, would carry the beast-god around to the far side of the ravine. Only by crossing on the log bridge could they keep in touch.
At first it seemed that the surviving tricerotop would pass them by. It was some distance away. It, too, had been struck by more than one of Kong’s asphalt slabs and had suffered injuries which held the center of its thoughts.
“Keep down!” Denham repeated Driscoll’s warning.
They got a little closer to the trees.
Suddenly, without reason, the tricerotop wheeled at right angles to its line of retreat and lumbered toward them. They dared not risk the chance that it would turn again before seeing them. All leaped erect and fled. And again, as with the dinosaur, all got clear except the slowest man. Glancing back in fright, this one crashed into a low-hanging branch, fell and picked himself up too late. He tried to swing behind the shelter of a small tree but the blundering tricerotop crashed into this and came down in a heap, man and tree underneath. Then, as the others watched, the beast rose on its fore knees, felt for its victim with its long central
horn, and gored him to death.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Stumbling toward the ravine, the weary survivors of the searching party showed none of the confidence which had been so high in them when they trotted away from the great gate. They were picked men. Every one had been proved more than ordinarily resourceful. Again and again when confronted with sudden danger they had revealed and sustained that high courage which is the adventurer’s final salvation, more potent than any weapon. Cast away in any ordinary wilderness they would have boldly combined their wisdom and ingenuity and won out. But here, for the first time, they knew the meaning of utter helplessness. Of what use was such guile and wit as theirs against the huge fantastic beasts of this nightmare island? Their frail knives, too, were useless. As they ran it was borne home upon them that along with their rifles and bombs had sunk their last hope. Armed with these they could have fought on. Lacking them they were as helpless as the trapped tricerotop and its mate slowly smothering to death back in the morass. No one, not even the buoyant Jimmy, stood ready now to say that the odds were fifty-fifty.
Hard, sullen oaths dropped from their lips as they ran; not oaths of defiance, but the bitter, resentful bursts of men who have been enmeshed through no fault of their own and who see no way of escape.
Only Driscoll and Denham fought against this mood of surrender. Leading the tired flight the young mate cudgeled his brain for the trick which would help his weaponless hands to free Ann from her strange captor. Trailing in second place Denham ordered his wits to call up a picture of the trail they had taken out from the village. They must go back, if they could. One man must stay and try to keep track of Kong; but the others must go back for more rifles, more bombs. Then they would have a chance.
From the rear came the crash of a heavy body ploughing among the trees.
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