by Dean Owen
Her astonishment and that throbbing silence hurt Gary as few things in his life had ever done. But he clamped down on himself and waited for Leda’s answer.
“Why—why, yes,” she finally said, and her voice was a little strange. “I’ll go. Surely. Someone has to.”
Gary stepped across to the caribou horns for her old raincoat and an extra sweater, found the flashlight on the table, came back to her; and in silence he helped her put the garments on.
At the door as he lifted the heavy beam and the latch, his lips touched her hair.
“Don’t be scared, Lee. It’ll be all right.”
Leda stepped across the threshold without answering.
When she was a few feet from the cabin, Gary called out to her—spiking the last slight danger that those men might mistake her for him.
“Leda?”—he called loudly, above the howl of the storm.
Leda stopped. In the swirl of rain and sleet and whipping gale he barely could see her, by the flash glow—a dim girlish figure, with the wind molding the old slicker about her. She was so frightened that the light trembled in her hand, but nevertheless she was courageously going out into the night to look for old Nat.
“What is it?” she called back.
“He’s probably at the lean-to. Look there.”
“That’s where I was going,” Leda said.
She turned and went on.
Holding the door open a scant inch, Gary waited, listened, shutting his eyes to blot out the sight of that bobbing flash. It was an ordeal to see Leda go, to let her leave him. Now he would be alone in the cabin, facing death by himself, without friend or partner or human company. Not until that moment did he realize how much Leda’s presence had strengthened him against his fears and the creepy blackness.
Sooner than he expected—when Leda was scarcely halfway to the lean-to in the balsams—he heard a sudden frantic outcry from her:
“Gary! G-a-r-y!”
Then the cry was stifled and cut off, as though a coat or blanket had been flung over her head.
When he heard that, Gary closed the door and dropped the beam into its notch again.
As he backed away from that danger spot, he said silently: “At least you’re safe, Lee—now. When this is all over, you’ll understand why I sent you out there.”
Half a minute later, while he was deciding on a plan for his get-away, he heard some one fumble quietly with the door latch and then heave against the heavy wood beam.
Knowing that the door was securely barred, he hurried across to Leda’s small room and crept up to the window, praying that his hasty plan of escape might work. If it did, if he could get only a few steps from the cabin, the storm would swallow him up. He could hit down the Saghelia trail, meet Rhodes and lead those men back to free Leda.
With his face against the glass, he tried to look outside, suspecting that the window was guarded. The storm and blackness were against him, and he saw nothing.
Taking a gamble on a bullet or a deadly smash from a belt ax, he raised the sash, as noiselessly as possible.
The storm soughed in, a cold blast of icy rain and club-like wind. With a quivering awareness that the next few seconds might mean the difference between life and death for him, he unfastened the screen and tensed himself for a leap and headlong dash.
As he swung the screen out and the wind banged it against the cabin logs, a dark form, crouching unseen beneath the ledge, sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, lunged halfway through the window, and seized him with a bearlike grapple.
“Cézar!” The man yelled wildly at the others, struggling to pinion Gary. “Shushaugh! Here! Hyak!”
Gary tore free from the grappling arms, pushed his enemy back and swung at him; but he missed the man, and his fist cracked against the head of Leda’s cot. As he heard the answering yells of the other men, near at hand, he slammed the window down and bolted it, and sprang back into the room, expecting a hail of bullets through the glass.
No bullets came. Except for the eerie noises of the storm, the silence fell again.
Cursing his failure to escape, he flipped the blood from his broken knuckles and moved over to the table, wondering why those men hadn’t shot. And why hadn’t the guard at the window pumped a clip of bullets into him or smashed him with an ax, instead of grappling? The man had had a wide-open chance to kill him, and had passed it up. Were they trying to take him alive?
He could not believe this. Those men were acting under Hugh Ludlow’s orders, and Hugh was so crazed with jealousy that nothing short of a killing would satisfy the man.
Though escape by the door or windows was impossible, he doggedly refused to give up his idea of a break-away. Wasting no time trying to puzzle out the strange acts of his enemies, he swept the candles and flower creels from the heavy block table, picked it up and lugged it across to the northeast corner of the cabin.
From the box behind the stove he grabbed up three sticks of wood, carried them to the table and laid them handy on a high shelf there.
His plan was to pry up a corner of the roof, squeeze through, drop to the ground outside and vanish. His enemies would not be expecting that move or guarding against it. If he could lift those two end rafters and make an opening a foot wide, he would be hurrying down the Saghelia trail while this pack smashed their way into an empty cabin.
Vaulting on top of the table, he straightened up till his shoulders were pressing against the lodgepole rafters. With his legs planted wide and his right hand gripping the split-logs, he braced himself, and began pushing up.
The two rafters, groaning and creaking, gave a little and finally started out of their notches. From the caves to the ridgepole the chinking of mud and sphagnum broke loose and fell to the floor. Through the crack above the top beam the storm came whistling in as he heaved upward.
With heart pounding wildly, he realized that he could make an opening big enough to escape by. If those men would only hold off their attack a few minutes longer.
When the crack was three inches wide, he slipped a stick of wood into it, chocked it securely, paused a moment to get a new purchase and catch a breath. His lungs seemed bursting; and in spite of the raw cold wind beating against him, the weight and strain were so tremendous that he had broken into a sweat.
As he started to ease into the lift again, he heard a bang-whanging on the door, as though some one was trying to catch his attention and draw an answer from him.
He kept silent, thinking that his enemies were attempting to find out where he was in the cabin so that they could pour a blast at him through the window.
The sharp hammering came again, then a voice hailed him. “You in dere! Speak op!”
Gary recognized the voice as that of Cézar, Eutrope’s half-breed partner. The man wanted to palaver him.
For a moment he debated whether to answer or not. Why on earth should that pack wish to palaver? But if they really did, he might turn it to his own advantage. Might stall them long enough to make certain of his get-away. Another minute or two, another good heave or two, and he’d be slipping through that opening into the oblivion of the storm.
“You hear me?” Cézar called again. “Say somet’ing!”
Gary stepped off the table and crouched beside the stove, where he was shielded from the window.
“What d’you want?” he demanded. It seemed strange to him, strange and a little unreal, that he should be talking to men who intended to blot him out of existence.
“We wan’ a leetle wa-wa wit’ you.”
“Go ahead! If you’ve got anything to say, let’s have it!”
“It’s jus’ dis: you’ll give up to us wit’out making no fight, or you’ll fin’ yourself laying in de brush tomorrow morning, wit’ a whisky-jack pecking at your eyes! Put your gun down, open dis door, and den do w’at we say; and we’ll deal fair-square wit’ you. Dat’s a
promise.”
Gary laughed at him, harshly. “D’you think I’m that crazy, you slinker? A hell of a lot of trust I’d put in a promise from you killers! I’ve had a coupla experiences with your ‘fair-square’ dealing. You’re out to bump me off.”
“We coulda bump’ you dere by de winner,” Cézar came back. “But we didn’ wan’ dat. W’at we wan’ is a leetle talk wit’ you, and dat’s w’at we’ll have if we got to blow dis cabane to hell’n gone and peeck you out of de spleenters!”
Gary could not deny that they could have killed him at the window a few minutes ago. But they didn’t want that. They wanted him alive! At least for a time.
Their unguessable purpose bewildered him. Though he begrudged the precious seconds, when he might be making a get-away, he checked himself from breaking off the strange palaver. He was bewildered, too, by the violence and feverish excitement in Cézar’s voice.
“Whatever you’ve got to say, hurry it up,” he ordered. “What’s it about?”
“About dat cache!” Cézar blazed, his tones throaty with emotion. “We wan’ to know w’ere dat gol’ is at!”
Gary came to his feet in sheer astonishment, all oblivious of danger from a rifle blast through the window. In the name of heaven, how did these men know anything about the cache? Had they been shadowing him and Leda on the morning of the big blow? Or had one of them slipped into this cabin, somehow, and seen the little poke of dust which he and Leda had brought home from the overfalls cave?
Maybe they really knew nothing about the cache at all. Maybe they only suspected that he might have found it. Or maybe Hugh Ludlow had spun a lie out of whole cloth, out of merely his imagination, to bring them here tonight.
Trying to draw the ’breed out, he demanded: “What cache? What’re you talking about?”
“In dat cave behin’ de overfalls!” Cézar snarled; and Gary realized, then, that the man and his companions did know about the Rusk cache. “Don’ try to stall wit’ us. You foun’ de cave yesterday morning, you and dis Leda; and you foun’ de box of gol’ back in dere! Den, las’ night, you wen’ back op dere by yourself and took de gol’ out and hid it somew’eres. Dat box is empty, de pokes is laying ’round in de dirt, de gol’ is gone, and you’re de person dat stole it.”
The man’s words so dumfounded Gary that for moments he was speechless. Not only did these men know about the cave, the cache, the staggering fortune of dust and nuggets—not only that, but the gold had been taken out of the cave and had vanished! That was the plain and unmistakable meaning of Cézar’s snarling accusation. Beyond any question these men had actually been back in the cave and with their own eyes had seen the box where the plunder had lain. And the box was empty now.
“Lord!” he gasped. “Lee and I have lost that fortune! Somebody has snaked it away from us. Last night—it happened then! The shooting last night around the cabin—it was aimed to hold us here while that half a million was being lifted!”
But who had lifted it? Not these men outside. All too clearly, the loss of the fortune had stirred them to a murderous rage. And they genuinely believed that he was the person who had taken it.
Cézar spoke again. “We wan’ to know w’ere you cached dat stuff. You give op, take us to de place and show us de gol’, and den—den we’ll turn you free.”
The ultimatum showed Gary why he had not been killed a few minutes ago and why these men were not shooting into the cabin. He was worth half a million dollars to them—or so they thought. They meant to take him prisoner, make him lead them to the new cache, then dispose of him.
He strode over to the door, where he could talk better with Cézar. The ’breed’s threat to blow the cabin “to hell’n gone” betrayed that the pack had brought dynamite cartridges along and could blast their way inside almost when they wished. And they’d be doing it unless he could convince them that he had not lifted the gold. If he could talk to them calmly and marshal his evidence, he could prove where he had been and turn their fury away from himself.
“Cézar, listen to me,” he said earnestly. “You’re right about our finding that gold. We did. Only yesterday morning, as you said. But we walked away from there and left it, and we haven’t been back since. If it isn’t there now, somebody else took it out. I’m as much in the dark as you.”
An ugly growl from the métis cut him short. “I s’pose,” Cézar fleered, “dat you didn’ keel Skunk-Bear a mont’ ago, hein? And didn’ shoot Eutrope las’ night, op at de valley head, hein? Your bluff don’ work wit’ us.”
“‘Eutrope—last night’?” Gary echoed, thunderstruck. “Are you telling me that Eutrope got killed? And that I did it? Why, you fool, you damned fool, I was here in this cabin all last night, getting shot at. I can prove—”
Again that ugly growl. The hard unshakable disbelief of it chilled Gary’s blood; and he began backing away from the door, feeling the uselessness of any palaver or any attempt to convince those men of the truth. They were in no mood to listen. He could throw facts at them as big as mountains, and those facts would be like pebbles glancing off a granite boulder. Nothing he could say or do would break down their belief that he had plundered the cache.
He shuddered at the thought of falling into their hands alive, and of their attempts to make him talk. He couldn’t talk. But they fully believed he could. They’d try to torture out of him a secret that he did not know.
In those few moments as he backed from the door to the table in the corner, the dark riddle of last night’s happenings cleared up for him; and in a hasty flitting way he pieced together the story of how that gold had disappeared. These men had not taken it; Leda and old Nat were equally out of the question; Eutrope was dead; one person remained:
Hugh Ludlow.
Somehow Hugh had found out about the overfalls cave. Last night he had sent one of his bush-sneaks to shoot at this cabin while he himself slipped up the valley and grabbed off that half a million. He had not only double-crossed his own men but had used them, cunningly, as pawns in his private vengeance game. Sometime today he had taken them up to the cave, showed them the rifled cache, roused them to fury with his story about that gleaming hoard and the fortunes it would mean for them all. And then, with utter heartlessness both toward them and toward his enemy, he had pointed them at the isolated cabin in the balsams.
And they had come.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Outside, Cézar kicked at the door. “Hyak, you! W’at-ever you wan’ to do, be saying it. You open dis door and take us to w’ere you cached dat gol’, or we’ll blow ourself in dere and carve it out of you.”
In the dark Gary bumped against the table. “Let me think it over,” he called to the ’breed, fighting for time to break away. “Give me five minutes—”
“We don’ give you nut’ing. You don’ cook op any of your fonny treecks on us. You have dis door open ’fore I coun’ twenty, or bigar we open it wit’ an earthquake steck! Wan, two, t’ree…”
Gary sprang upon the table, as that ominous counting started, and heaved with all his strength against the lodge-pole rafters. From his enemies outside he heard a quick excited jabbering in bush-French, and he knew they were preparing a dynamite stick and placing it against the door.
With maddening slowness the eaves crack widened, inch by inch, till it was seven or eight inches high. Battling desperately for the seconds, he grabbed another chock, thrust it into the opening, and took a new purchase.
“Twelve, t’irteen”—the count was steadily mounting. A silence had fallen, outside, as though the other men had scrambled away and only Cézar remained, tolling off the seconds before he touched a match to the “earthquake stick.”
At “seventeen” Gary felt of the opening, saw it was wide enough for him to skin through, seized his third chock, and thrust it under.
In his frantic haste he failed to plant the chock solidly. A club-like blast of wind hit
the cabin and shook the loosened corner of the roof; the chock jarred out and fell… As the rafters banged down into their notches again, one of them took Gary a hard smash on the head and shoulders.
For a moment he leaned weakly against the wall, a little dazed by the blow and this end to his hopes for a breakaway.
Then he noticed that the counting had stopped and a sinister silence had fallen.
Gathering himself together, he stepped off the table, crouched down beside the wall bench, groped around in the darkness for some weapon, found old Nat’s bootjack, and then waited, shielding his face with his arm. Still doggedly refusing to give up, he believed that when the door was blown down he might be able to leap outside and vanish, in the confusion and storm, before the rush came pouring in.
In the tumult of his thoughts he realized that it would be better for him to get killed outright, a quick merciful oblivion, than to fall into the power of those men.
He fancied he could hear the spluttering fuse of the “earthquake stick” outside the door. The seconds seemed hours long, and he began thinking the explosion would never come.
But it came at last, suddenly—a terrific bellowing kr-oo-mm. The concussion deafened him; a rush of acrid air snatched his breath away; the explosion knocked him bodily against the wall, dazing him. The door was broken from its heavy hinges, flung across the cabin like a piece of cardboard, and banged against the stove. The stove itself seemed to explode—breaking into half a dozen pieces and collapsing; and its mass of glowing red coals rolled out upon the floor. The glass of the two windows shattered to bits; Leda’s dishes flew from the shelves like things alive; the stove pipe clattered down; a rain of mud and sphagnum fell from the chinks against the logs; and the whole cabin inside was turned to a mass of ruin and wreckage.
Shaking off his daze, Gary got to his feet, a little wobbly for a moment, and made for the doorway, with the bootjack in his hand. Going to take him alive, were they? That might be their little mistake. With guns and axes they could put him out easily enough, but a knock-down battle with fist and club was a game he could play at too.
