by Dean Owen
Oblivious of the storm, they left the overhang and made their way out along the rim-rock foot, fighting the gale-like wind and drenched by the heavy rain.
At the east edge of the caldron pool they stopped, looking at the apron of water and shielding their eyes from the spume. A flat sheet of rock, slippery, steeply slanted, led up to the cascade and into the dark unknown beyond.
“We’ll have to walk right through that overfalls, Lee,” Gary said. “But we can’t get any wetter than we are now.”
“Let’s go! We don’t mind a cold splashing.”
Gary hesitated. If the Rusk cache was anywhere in the whole valley, it was in this cave. Hidden through spring, summer and autumn by those plunging waters, and hidden in winter behind a mantle of ice and gigantic seventy-foot icicles, the place was a rendezvous without equal, a hideaway where Chilcote Rusk and his pack could well have laughed at the Vigilant posses scouring Little Saghelia. A score of times Leda and he had passed within a few rods of the place, without the remotest suspicion that it existed.
“What’re you waiting on?” Leda demanded, brushing the spindrift from her eyes. “I tell you that cache is in there!”
Gary glanced around at the rim-rock and the woods, dim through the heavy rain. “I believe so myself, Lee. But that’s just the point. We wouldn’t want to find the cache and then have it snatched away from us. Maybe we shouldn’t go in there now. It might be better to come back tonight.”
“You think somebody may be watching?”
“It’s possible.”
“Not in this rain. Look—you can’t see a hundred yards. If I had to wait all day I’d—I’d—”
“—bust,” Gary completed. “I’d doggone near, myself. All right, let’s go in. Gosh, Lee, if we’ve actually found that cache, after people have hunted seventy years—”
“Don’t talk about it! Let’s go in and see it!”
With their hearts pounding and their thoughts a little dizzy, they stepped across the slippery rock, hand in hand. At the curtain of water they paused, took a deep breath, bent their heads, and dashed through the buffeting deluge.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Behind the sheet of water, they found themselves in a stygian darkness, with the roar of the overfalls in their ears.
Gary took the flashlight from his knapsack and snapped it on. As he played the yellow beam on the roof and walls and dank slimy floor of the cavern, disappointment seized him.
Wet and chill, the place seemed wholly uninhabitable to human beings. The cave led on back; he could see a black tunnel of good size leading beyond the limit of the flash; but a little streamlet of icy water flowing down that tunnel dashed his hopes of finding anything back there but this same darkness and slime. The place was so cold and the air so dead that his frosted breath hung around his head in wisps of cloud white.
By the glow of the flash he saw tears gather in Leda’s eyes and roll down her cheeks. As though to complete her misery, when she turned to look around at the dripping wall behind her, her moccasins slipped and she fell to her knees.
Forgetting his own disappointment, Gary lifted her up, wiped the mud from her dress and kissed away her tears.
“Don’t cry, honey—anyway not yet. Let’s go on and see what’s back in there. It may get better, or turn off.”
With the icy streamlet gurgling around their ankles, they started on back through the tunnel.
As they went further from the spume and wet of the overfalls, the ceiling and walls gradually became dry. Their hopes perked up a little at this; Leda stopped crying; and they hurried along, watching for side tunnels.
Thirty paces back in, they came to a small step-up where the streamlet tumbled over a miniature ten-inch overfalls. As Gary pointed the flash downward to show Leda where to step, he noticed a dull-colored object, somewhat larger than a corncob, lying in the crystal water of the tiny “caldron pool.” Though he believed it merely a rock fragment, its odd shape made him curious, and he picked it up.
“Lee! This thing’s heavy, like metal! It is metal!”
“What is it?”
“Here—hold the flash! We’ll see!”
With trembling hands he washed the mud from his find and held it up. Metal, back in this cold black catacombs—some human had been in here!
Half a foot long and two inches thick, the object looked like a plain block of iron with a row of small holes drilled down the middle. He could make nothing of it.
“Can you figure this out, Lee?”
She took the object, examined it, poked a finger into one of the holes, started to shake her head, then gasped.
“It’s a bullet-mold! Gary, that’s an old-fashioned bullet-mold! Look—that line of rust—that’s where it splits down the center.”
In the yellow glow they stared at each other, silent, shaken. The hunk of rusty iron, decades old, brought them a breath of those frontier days when buffalo herds thundered on the plains, when the headwater hills of Saghelia were yielding their golden spoil, and this land was a wilderness.
Gary put the mold down. “Lee, this hunk of iron molded bullets that killed men. It’s old, old. It’s a relic of Chilcote’s pack. They must have been back in here.”
With Leda grasping his arm, shivering from the cold and sepulchral dark, he started on.
Though the bullet-mold was dead-certain proof that he and Leda had stumbled at least upon the trail of the Chilcote outfit, he had been disappointed so often and so bitterly in this hunt that he refused to build any castles. He swore to himself that he would have to look at the cache of gold with his own eyes before believing he had found it.
Ten paces farther, they came to a side corridor, branching off to the right. They turned into it.
In the dust of the floor they saw faint impressions, all but obliterated; and, in the center, a path like a firm beaten trail. When they stooped to examine the signs closely, they saw that the impressions were of moccasins, shoe-pacs and cleated miners’ boots.
In comparison with these dim imprints, the tracks which they had seen in other caves—tracks of search parties five or ten years old—seemed to have been made but yesterday.
“It’s their tracks, Gary!” Leda whispered. “It’s the tracks of Chilcote and his men!”
“Maybe so, Lee. But I’m wanting to see more than tracks before we do any celebrating.”
Twisty and hard to follow, the tunnel led them on and on, till the roar of the overfalls became a low uncertain whisper. They passed through several room-widenings. A confusion of side corridors branched off. But always they had those old tracks and the path to guide them.
With their flash getting feeble and no cord stretching behind them to the world outside, they grew afraid of becoming lost in that black underground maze; and several times they stopped and held whispered consultations about turning back. But each time, lured by that dim old path they went on.
Around a last sharp bend the tunnel abruptly widened into a big room, low-vaulted but of good extent.
As they halted at the entrance-way, staring around with wide eyes, they knew, beyond mortal doubt, that they had found the rendezvous of Chilcote Rusk and his pack.
Against the far wall they saw fuel wood, nearly two cords of it, chopped by human hands and brought in from the outside. With a rude pine-twig broom the dust of that room had been swept into one corner, in the rough-and-ready way of frontier men; and the broom itself, with its needles crumbled to brown dust, lay in the corner where the last man had flung it. The floor had been covered with hides of deer and caribou, but the hides were little more than a film of gray ashes, after those seventy-odd years.
They saw no signs of the cache of gold.
With Leda still holding to his arm, frightened by the ghostly quiet of that ancient murderers’ den, Gary stepped across to the woodpile, selected a stick of resinous pine, struck a doub
le match and lighted a torch. When it was burning well, he snapped off the flash, to save it for their return back the long tortuous tunnel.
“Let’s have a better look at this gear, Lee,” he said, trying hard to be matter-of-fact. The dead quiet and the eerie haunted feeling of the place weighed on him more than he cared for Leda to know. He would not have been wholly surprised if the brutal Chilcote Rusk, with pistol and belt knife, had come leaping at him from the flickering shadows. “This room looks to me like a place where they stored things. I don’t think they lived in here at all.”
By the light of the smoky pine they moved around the room, staring at the queer old mementos of a bygone life. Against a wall leaned half a dozen canoe paddles, handmade, of tough ash-heart. In a corner lay an assortment of snowshoes, the babische netting rotted but the wood frames still strong enough to be used. In a big side pocket of the room, they came upon a confused unsorted pile of utensils, whisky flasks, ropes and chains, bar lead for making bullets.
As they looked at the pile they realized that it was plunder taken from those murdered men and carelessly flung there, against a possible need.
Near that pocket, in a cabinet-like niche in the wall, they paused and stared at a strange collection of guns, half a hundred or more, also plundered from those hapless victims. Needle guns, early breech-loaders, big pistols and awkward revolvers, big-bore rifles for bear and caribou and buffalo, long heavy muzzle-loaders with powder flask and ramrod, fancily mounted fowling pieces for ducks and geese, cheap trading-store guns—it was like a museum collection of old firearms, long antedated, and inexpressibly clumsy in comparison with Leda’s trim light .25-35.
From the storage room one corridor led away—straight on; and when they had stared around for a little time, trying to shake off the dreamlike spell that lay upon them they moved over to the corridor and entered it.
In less than ten paces the tunnel broadened into a second room, large and high-vaulted; and they knew that they had penetrated to the main quarters of the bandit outfit.
In the center of the room was a fireplace, partly an open fire for warmth, partly a stove crudely fashioned of flat rocks and sheet-iron, for cooking purposes. On top of the stove lay a couple of rusty pots and kettles and a huge frying pan, precisely as those men had left things seventy-odd years ago. To one side stood a big slab table, with several goose-tallow candles upon it and with the dishes unwashed from the last meal of the pack, before they walked into the annihilation of the Vigilant trap. On a chair lay a man’s hat; on the table edge, a pipe filled, ready to light.
Everything about the place gave impression that Chilcote Rusk and his killers had walked out of there only a few hours ago and presently would be tramping back in with the plunder taken from some traveler of old Paradise Trail.
And everywhere—on the crude chairs, leaning against the walls, hanging on iron pegs in the soft rock—they saw more guns, rifles and hand guns, dozens of them, along with spears and ram-horn bows for silent hunting. The place looked like an arsenal.
In comparison with the other room and the tortuous black tunnel, the air of the main hall seemed fresh and alive; and Gary noticed that the flame of his pine torch swayed slightly as though moved by some faint current. Holding the torch behind him, he looked around at the walls and roof.
High up in one corner, fully fifty feet over his head, he saw a dim gray glow where a few feeble rays of light straggled in from some fissure or frost crack. The opening not only supplied air but made a good smoke-draw.
Whether there was any egress by that opening, any way for a human to reach the outside world, he did not know; but he doubted. The gray glow looked wholly inaccessible; and the beaten trail of the tunnel indicated that the Rusk pack had come and gone by way of the overfalls.
Just a few feet to their right, as they stood in the entrance-way, they saw a sleeping platform of balsam branches, dry and sere. The crumpled blankets, the leather sleeping pokes, the tousled pillows of caribou hide stuffed with rags and hair and feathers—these too gave impression that here the Chilcote Rusk men had slept only last night, and would return with the shadows of evening.
Fearfully, almost afraid to set foot in that main den, they moved over to the table; and Gary touched a match to all of the five large goose-tallow candles there.
As the candles spluttered and then brightened into steady flame, driving back the shadows and tomblike dark, he was jolted to his boots by the sight of a skeleton, a man skeleton, stretched on the floor and scarcely three paces from him.
With quick presence of mind he stepped in front of Leda, to keep her from seeing it. The long black tunnel, the ghostly quiet, the old guns and the haunting knowledge that here a pack of murderers once dwelt, had shaken his girl partner badly; and he was afraid she might go completely to pieces if she saw that grisly thing on the floor.
He was too late. Even as he moved, Leda glimpsed the whitish bones, took one horrified look, and whirled to Gary, with a startled cry. Burying her face against his breast, she clung to him, trembling violently.
“Gary! T-take me—out of h-h-here,” she pleaded, her teeth chattering till she could hardly talk. “I d-don’t want to see anything m-m-more. Let the gold g-g-go.”
“Don’t be scared, honey,” he calmed her, holding her close to him as though she were a small frightened child. “That thing there won’t hurt us. It’s just some old bones, that’s all. We mustn’t go back out, Lee, till we see whether the gold is still here or not. You sit in this chair, sweet, and let me look around, won’t you?”
“No, no! Don’t you g-go off from me! Let’s l-l-look, q-q-quick and get out of this p-place.”
“All right, honey. We’ll just take a minute.”
With Leda still hiding her eyes, he stepped up closer to the skeleton and looked down at it, thinking that one or maybe more of those Rusk men must have escaped the Vigilant trap and returned to the rendezvous. Perhaps one of them, this one, had been mortally wounded, and had died here. Perhaps those others, if there had been others, had fled the country, taking the gold with them.
As he gazed at the skeleton he saw that when death came the arms had been folded on the body, and the legs had been drawn up as though from cold or suffering. The clothing had fallen away, except for a few tatters.
Around the bones of the wrists and ankles he saw, to his puzzled surprise, small lengths of chain, rusty, the rivets still in place; and from the skeleton itself a five-foot length of chain led to an iron staple driven into the floor.
In a moment or two the puzzle cleared up for him, and he pieced together the story of this solitary skeleton in the old rendezvous. The man had not been a member of the Chilcote outfit at all, but a prisoner of the pack. Less lucky than those miners who had been murdered outright, the poor devil had been captured and brought here by those old killers. For some unknown purpose—whether to torture information out of him, or use him as a decoy on their murderous sallies—they had kept him here in chains. Here he had been when they walked into the Vigilant annihilation; and when they failed to come back, here he had died.
With a pitying glance at the skeleton, Gary moved on, with Leda, across to the far wall of the room where the candles dimly lit up a good-sized wooden box, made of slabs, and bound with angle-and strip-iron.
The heaviness of the slabs, the time and evident pains taken with that iron-work, told him that when he and Leda lifted that dusty lid, they would see the hoard of gold—if it was anywhere in this cave.
“That’s the cache, Lee,” he whispered, his voice a little jerky as he stared at the coffin-like box. “It’s your privilege—you hunted for this gold months before I ever came—to lift the lid from that half a million.”
“N-no. You d-d-d-o it, Gary.”
“Go ahead, honey. Then we’ll get out of here. We need help, Lee. We’ll get back home, we’ll hire some good men that we can trust, and then we’ll come b
ack. This has been here seventy years, and it’ll stay a couple days longer.”
Leda bent over. Her teeth were still chattering, and she kept one hand on Gary’s arm; but with the other she took hold of the iron handle and lifted the lid.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
With his eyes still big from wonder of what he had seen, the half-breed Eutrope came hurrying in to Hugh Ludlow’s camp late that same afternoon. Without a word to the other men there, he made straight for Hugh’s tent and burst into it unannounced.
In a savage mood, Hugh was sitting on the cot, head in hands, cursing the monotonous rain and his evil run of luck.
In the past forty-eight hours one disaster after another had tumbled upon him, with dazing suddenness. Yesterday his chances with Mona Casper had come to an abrupt and unexpected end. Courageous in the face of heartbreak, Mona had severed all relationship with him and was getting away from Saghelia for good; and he realized, too late, that his stalling game with her had not exactly worked.
And yesterday Marl Casper, with control of the narrow-gauge completely in his hands, had stopped all Ludlow shipments—lumber, metals, coal and everything—out to the Grand Trunk. The Ludlow timber crews had come in; the mines and mills were closed; the crash which had been impending for weeks and months had at last come.
This was the picture which Hugh was staring at, as he sat in his tent that murky afternoon. Almost overnight he had lost Mona, and his inheritance had been swept away.
He cursed himself and Mona and his father and Marl Casper, but mostly himself. If he had married Mona and stopped that war, instead of gambling like a fool on finding a cache of gold that maybe never existed, today he would be wealthy. With all that money and power, it would have been easy enough to ship Mona off to the Riviera, which she was prattling about, and bring Leda around to his wishes.
