Kennedy was cursing again, for he had stumbled against the spike-tipped leaves of an agave with direful results, and then blundered into the water before he knew they had reached it, but Boots was cheerful.
An occasional flare of distant lightning gave them twilight glimpses of the way, but otherwise they stumbled through breathless blackness, their only guide the feel of the trodden trail to their feet and the soft rush and gurgle of water beside it. The path grew steeper and more difficult, as it left the stream to flow between rapidly heightening banks.
Came another flare of lightning, brighter and nearer. Boots halted so abruptly that Kennedy trod on his heels.
A forest Of giant ferns had leaped into existence on their right, and immediately before them, almost upon them, it appeared, was an enormous, grayish figure, huge, flat-faced, that leered and grinned.
Like the flick of a camera shutter the light had come and gone. They were blind again, but flee leader flang out his hands and touched the thing he had glimpsed.
“Stone!” Boots’ voice was distinctly relieved. “It’s just a big image by the path.” Boots struck a match and held it high,
Six feet above his head the gray face leered downward. Its grin seemed alive in the wavering light-alive and menacing, but Boots grinned back more good-naturedly. “You poor heathen idol! You gave me a start, you did. Aztec, do you think, Mr. Kennedy?”
“Of course. Tlaloc, God of the Hills and the Rain. Unless I’m mistaken. Yes, there is the cross of the Tlalocs carved at the foot. Where are you going now?”
“On, to be sure. We’re coming to the pass I surmised was here that leads from the ravine into the hills beyond. It’s the beyond I’ve a wish to investigate.”
The path was indeed very narrow, and the sound of water came up as a low and distant murmur. On that side was blackness and the sense of space. On the other, an occasional brushing against face or hand told of the great ferns that stretched thin frond-fingers across the way.
Then abruptly the path ended, or seemed to end. Their feet sank in moss or soft turf, and Boots collided with an unexpected tree trunk. Both men halted and for a moment stood hesitant.
The silence was uncanny. Not a whisper among the ferns, not the call of a night-bird. Even the usual insect-hum was stifled and repressed to a key so low that it seemed only part of the stillness. The cloud-lid was heavy above earth. The dense air pressed on the ear drums, as on first descent into a deep mine or well.
Then, as they stared ahead through blackness, the attention of both men was suddenly attracted by a faint, purplish glowing. It was quite near the ground and a short distance ahead of them. There was grass there, straight, slender stems of it, growing in delicate silhouette against that low, mysterious light.
Advancing, Boots peered in puzzled question. As he neared it the light flashed brighter with a more decided tinge of purple, and out of the grass a wonder soared up to float away on iridescent wings.
It was a huge, mothlike insect, fully ten inches from wing-tip to wing-tip, and the glowing came from its luminous body, in color pale amethyst, coldly afire within. The broad wings, transparent as a globular walls of a bubble, refracted the creature’s own radiance in a network of shimmering color.
Boots gasped sheer delight, but Kennedy’s comment was as usual eminently practical.
“Sa-a-y! That beauty would bring a fortune from any museum. Do you suppose there are any more about?”
The moth had settled in the long grass, where a dim glowing again marked its presence. Cautiously the two men moved in that direction.
They seemed to have come upon a sort of high meadow, though what might be its extent or general contour was impossible to say. As they went, another and yet another of the moths glowed, shimmered and rose, flushed up by their swishing progress through the grass.
“Like a dream of live soap bubbles,” murmured Boots. “Wouldn’t it be a shame now to catch one of those beauties and smother out the flaming life of him?”
“For a young man of your size you have the least practical sense-hel-lo!”
There was cause for the astonished ejaculation.
He had glanced to one side and there, standing between two slender trees with a hand on each, appeared a figure so exquisitely, startlingly appropriate that it was no wonder if for a moment both men questioned its reality.
The form was that of a young girl of fifteen or sixteen years-if she reckoned her age by mortal standards, which Boots for his part seriously doubted. But elf or human maiden, she was very beautiful. Her skin was white as that of Astrid, the wife of Biornson, and she watched them with wonderful, dark eyes, not in fear, but with a startled curiosity that matched their own.
All about the black mist of her hair the luminous moths were hovering. One, with slowly waving pinions, clung to her bare arm.
Recovering instantly from his first amazement, Kennedy surmised that the insects were tethered by fine threads, as women of the tropics fasten fireflies in their hair. To Boots, however, she seemed no less than the carnified spirit of the creatures, who held them to her by bond of their mutual natures.
Indeed, the garment in which she was draped had about its soft green folds a suggestion of the downy feathering of a moth’s body, and the necklace about her slim throat seemed itself alive with soft fires. Its jewels, smooth and oval in shape, glimmered and glowed with the gentle motion of her breathing.
Under his roughness, big, homely, redheaded Boots concealed all the romance, all the capacity for worship of his Celtic forebears. He stood at gaze, almost afraid to breathe lest the vision float up against the heavy background of night and go drifting away across the grass.
But Kennedy had other thoughts in his head. To him the girl was a girl, the wonder-moths no more than convenient lanterns by which he saw something greatly to be desired.
“What opals!” he cried softly. “Look at them, man! Why, that Indian girl has a fortune round her neck. By Jupiter, here’s where we square accounts with Biornson! There are opal-mines in these hills, and for some reason he doesn’t want his holdings known. You went right for once, boy! We’ve stumbled straight upon his precious secret!”
CHAPTER III. The Guardians of the Hills
BEFORE Boots had grasped his companion’s meaning, or guessed his purpose, Kennedy had crossed the short space between them and the lovely apparition. Like a child that has never been frightened by brutality, she watched his approach in grave, wide-eyed curiosity.
When, however, with one hand he grasped, her shoulder and with, the other snatched at the necklace, she gave a little cry and attempted to draw back. The moths fluttered wildly, dazzling Kennedy with then flashing bodies, beating their iridescent, panic-stricken wings in his very face. He released the necklace to strike at them, brush them aside.
Then at last Boots ran forward, but before he could reach them a sharp report shattered the heavy stillness and a bullet whined by so close to Kennedy’s head that he jumped back and instinctively flung up his hands.
“Keep them there!” commanded a stern voice.
Boots, who had halted at the shot, saw a dim, white figure striding toward them. Before it more moths flickered up, and by their ghostly light the newcomer was revealed as Biornson.
His guests’ informal departure had not, after all, gone undiscovered, and by the still smoking rifle he held at ready, and the brusk determination of his manner, the man intended an immediate resumption of his role as jailer.
At sight of him the moth-girl gave a low, birdlike thrill of pleasure. She began talking in soft, low tones, using a language strange to two of her hearers, but full of liquid, musical sounds.
Biornson answered her in the same tongue, though his accent was harsher and more forced. All the while he kept his rifle and his eyes trained on Kennedy. He finished speaking and the girl answered him briefly. Then Biornson deviated the threatening muzzle toward Boots, who had stood inactive since his coming.
“Stand over here, you! There, by yo
ur friend.”
Boots obeyed He understood exactly how the scene had appeared-one man ravishing the girl of her jewels, the other rushing to aid in the contemptible thievery.
“Mr. Biornson,” he began, “I had no wish at all to — “
“Silence! You big, redheaded bully, I have eyes and I saw what was going on here. Not that it surprises me. I took your measure when I first saw you in my gates. Now turn around, both of you. Do you see that stable lantern?”
They did. It was one which Biornson had brought to find his way by, and he had left it set on the path beyond the field of grass.
“March very straight and carefully toward that lantern. Remember that if I kill you it will only save me trouble.”
Kennedy was shaking with futile rage, but Boots was less angry than disturbed. He found himself in the position of many another innocent, careless man-condemned by the act of a rascally companion. But argument must wait. Just now there seemed nothing for either of them but obedience.
A little way from the spot where the girl stood looking wonderingly after, Kennedy struck his foot on a hidden stone, stumbled, and dropped to his knees. Seeing him fall, Biornson surmised the cause and waited for him to get up. He did, and in his hand was the stone he had tripped over.
Whirling with the nervous quickness of his anger and temperament, Kennedy flung the stone straight at the armed man behind them. More by good luck than aim it struck Biornson fairly between the eyes, so that he threw out his arms and reeled back and downward into the grass.
With a cry more like a wildcat’s voice than a man’s, Kennedy rushed to the fallen figure, snatched up the rifle and set its muzzle against Biornson’s temple. His finger curled to the trigger.
Another moment would have seen the scattering of Biornson’s brains, had not a hand intervened and snatched the gun aside.
“You-interfering-booby!” gritted Kennedy, as he wrestled for possession of the weapon. “Let me have it-let me have it, I say!”
Stumbling over the victim’s body, Boots lost his grip, and with a triumphant snarl the other sprang back and flung the rifle to his shoulder. But even as he took aim the sky above them ripped open in one jagged crevice of blinding fire.
The bolt shot across the clouds with a rattling, firecracker-like sound, splitting them asunder and releasing the pent-up deluge which all this while had hung above the earth. With the terrific explosion following that rattle and thrust of electricity, the clouds emptied themselves.
Startled and disconcerted, Kennedy had not fired and Boots again leaped in to close with him.
About them trees, meadow, and hills flickered through sheets of rain like scenes in an old-time moving picture.
Drenched, deafened by the incessant roar of rain and thunder, the two swayed stumblingly about. In that hampering turmoil Boots could not at first wrench the rifle from his antagonist, and though he might have easily killed the smaller man, bare-handed, this was far from his desire.
Then came an interruption more sudden and terrible than the storm, in whose tumult any warning noise there may have been was drowned.
Out of the curtaining rain a horde of ghost-white forms hurtled upon them. They were beasts; great snarling, white brutes, with slavering jaws and wolflike fangs.
Swept down by the rush, the human combatants were instantly buried under a piled, writhing heap of animal ferocity.
In the stress of that utterly unexpected attack, Boots did not try to analyze its nature. In the back of his mind there was a dim feeling of wonder that the elfin stillness and beauty of a few moments before should have culminated in such a series of cataclysms. For the rest, he knew that innumerable jaws and claws were tearing at his body, and that he was engaged in a mad, unequal fight to save his own life and Kennedy’s.
In some rare men the protective instinct is ineradicable. Because Archer Kennedy was his mate and weaker than he, in spite of all that had taken place Boots was as ready to give up life for him now as he had ever been.
They had fallen so that his body shielded the other man. That was accident. But the effort which throughout that delirious battle kept their positions the same was no accident, and Boots paid dearly for acting as a shield.
Had he been willing to fight his way to his feet again, he might have had a better chance. Flat down, the best he could do was to throttle any furry throat within reach and keep his own neck free from the tearing, furious fangs.
For a full two minutes the struggle continued.
Boots had one white demon squeezed tight to his chest, the smothering weight of its flank protecting his face. His fingers were buried in the throat of a second But he could not breathe wet fur, and the jaws of a third enemy were worrying at his right arm muscles. From shoulder to heel he felt them tearing and biting.
Taken at a tremendous disadvantage, blind, smothered and over-matched, Boots was in a very fair way to be torn to pieces when, suddenly, another rush of feet came plunging through the rain.
He did not hear them come. The first Boots knew of a change in conditions was that most of his snarling, growling tormentors had inexplicably ceased to either snarl, growl or bite. Then he realized that the weight of them also was off him.
The dirty cowards! They had given up the fight and run!
That left only the pair in his actual grip. With a gasp of fierce joy, Boots tightened his hold, rolled off from Kennedy-who, he greatly feared, was by this time smothered in the mud-and got his knees under him. Incidentally, he clamped the head of one kicking, white monster under the knees. The one whose throat he had been squeezing had ceased to struggle and he dropped it.
With his face free at last of the blinding fur, Boots knelt up straight and looked for the rest of the pack.
Though rain still fell in torrents, the lightning’s illumination was becoming more spasmodic, and Boots was hardly sure that what he saw was real.
Was he actually surrounded by a circle of strange, tall, white men? At each recurrent flash he seemed to see them. Tall men-inhumanly tall-the rain sluiced off bare, gleaming shoulders-the rounded muscles shone wet and white-their faces were stern, pallid, eyes fixed on him-their hands waved-they were pointing at him.
Through his Celtic brain flashed a wild suspicion that there stood the very beasts which had attacked him. Werewolves-creatures neither man nor brute, but able to take the form of either.
Under his knee, the white thing he held there wriggled feebly. He had already strangled one. Here was another whose diabolical tricks he could stop.
Dropping his hands, Boots shifted to find its throat and keeled over quietly in the squelching, trampled grass. His last conscious emotion was self-scorn that he hadn’t finished the “manwolf” before, like any common weakling, he died of his many wounds.
“Cheer up, or I’ll think you hard to content. ‘Tis the wonder of wonders, Mr. Kennedy, that they’ve let us live at all, and Biornson’s face fair ruined by the rock you hove at him.”
Swathed in bandages, lying on a grass-stuffed pallet in the cubical, brick-walled chamber which for three days had been their prison, Boots looked kindly reproof at his fellow captive.
Biornson himself had just paid them a brief call, and after his leaving, Kennedy’s sullen countenance appeared more somber than usual. Now he stared at the Irishman with the shadow of some strange dread in his eyes.
“Tlapallan!” he muttered softly. “Tlapallan! Did he really say Tlapallan, or did I dream it?”
“He did that,” the other confirmed. “And why, may I ask, should his saying it fill you with despair? It’s a fine, hard word, I’ll admit, but I’d never get it off my tongue like Biornson did, or you either, but — “
“Tlapallan!” Kennedy repeated it as if the other had not spoken. “He called this place Tlapallan-and if that is true-but it can’t be! Quetzalcoatl-Tlapallan-no, no; one can’t believe the impossible-and yet — “
His head drooped and his voice lowered to an indistinguishable mutter.
Here w
as a phase of the older man’s character entirely new to Boots, who eyed him with an amazement bordering on alarm. Their position was puzzling enough in all conscience, but Kennedy’s manner and speech of the last few minutes hinted of some new riddle, some potentiality for harm in a mere word which Boots found vaguely disturbing.
For three days they had been held close prisoners. The cell of their confinement, bare, built of yellow polished bricks, or rather tiles, was in the daytime lighted to a golden gloom by one small, round window, offering a barren view across a brick-paved alley to a wall of highly polished white stone. As for what that alley might lead to, or what might lie beyond the wall, they knew practically nothing.
This place was no part of the hacienda. The experience of Kennedy, who had been in his senses when brought here, told them that. They were, it was almost equally sure, somewhere beyond that pass which Boots had so eagerly desired to explore. Here ended their certainties and began a mystery beside which that of the ravine faded to commonplace insignificance.
After the calling off of the white hounds-in sober sense, and remembering the beast they had seen in the patio, Boots dismissed his thought of “werewolves” as nonsense-Kennedy had staggered to his feet. Though half-strangled from being crushed in the mud, he was otherwise unhurt.
No sooner was he up, however, than his arms were seized, a bandage was whipped over his eyes, and, the grip of those so much stronger than he that struggle was futile, he was dragged helplessly away.
Like a child between two grown folk, he could hear the men who held him murmuring together over his head. “Great lumbering louts!” he said viciously, in describing the affair. “They must have been even larger than you are, Boots, and goodness knows you’re big’ enough. They went muttering along like a couple of silly fools-talked the same gibberish as that girl with the opals. When I tried to ask a question, one of the brutes struck me in the face.”
Citadel of Fear Page 3
