Unexplored!

From this they presently entered into what seemed like a Gothic cathedral, with a dome whose highest point must have been several hundred feet above. The boys were fairly awed by its beauty, while the Ranger’s eyes gleamed appreciatively. On the walls were what might have been carvings of flowers and lacework, creamy to smoke color, gypsum, Ace told them.

“Are these fossils?” demanded Ted excitedly.

“I should say not, you poor fish! – You ichthyosaurus,” laughed Ace teasingly.

“You what?” asked the Ranger.

“That means ancient fish.”

“All right,” grinned Ted. “If I’m an ich–”

“Ich-thy-o-saur-us?” Radcliffe came to his rescue.

“Then you’re a dinosaur,” grinned Ted.

“Here, here, stop calling each other names!” commanded Radcliffe. “And perhaps Ace will tell us about this gypsum formation.”

“Thunder! Wish Norris was here! I tell you I’m no professor. But if you’re after fossils, don’t you remember what he told us, that day just before we lost the pack burro? – That in this part of California we have rock from the Cambrian era a mile thick, and I’ll bet it’s full of fossils of the fish age!”

“Well,” Radcliffe briskly interposed, as they came to another turn, “we’ll never find those Mexicans unless we separate and hunt faster than we’ve been doing. Are you fellows game for taking one way while I go back to that last turn and try the left hand passageway? Of course the instant you get wind of them, report back to me.” They signified their gameness by picking a precarious footing, (Ted first), along the slippery floor, their candles thrust in their hat bands.

Above they came to another but a smaller forest of alabaster stalactites, shining like icicles or mosses, some white as snow, some yellow as gold, and some so like maple sugar in appearance that Ace actually tasted it. In one place there was a bit of what Ace said was needle gypsum, that hung as fine as fur.

Radcliffe, retracing his steps, (with the aid of the twine ball), till he came to the cross roads, as it were, turned to the left and forged ahead with his carbide lamp, treading softly as a cougar, with revolver cocked in his right hand. Ever and anon he stopped breath-still to listen.

Passing through the same alabaster cavern that had so impressed the Spanish boy, his eye caught the bandanna Pedro had dropped in the left-hand passageway. With an inward exclamation, he hurried on till he had reached the end of the blind. Stooping with his lamp, he could see the fresh scratches their feet had made. Darting back to the turn of the tunnel, where he had picked up the bandanna, he took the only choice left to him, the right hand way, with all the satisfaction of a hound on the scent. More scratches on the sandstone floor assured him that they had really gone this way, instead of turning back the way they had come, and presently he too was standing in the gallery of the sloping floor and yellowed pillars, at whose far end the dripstone cataract hung, turned to soundless stone. But of the three Mexicans and Pedro there was no trace.

“I say, when do we eat?” Ace was just beginning, when the floor suddenly gave way beneath him, and he fell down a ten foot well, landing on all fours, in Stygian blackness. And no sooner had his bulk padded the stone beneath than Ted came, plunk! almost on top of him.

At the moment both were slightly stunned. Their candle flames had of course been flicked out. Then Ted reached mechanically for his matches, by whose flare he found his hat, and still firmly stuffed into the band, his candles. The light disclosed a cavern with muddy walls dripping above them, and to their right, an inky pool of water. The air was all aflutter with the bats they had startled from their pendant slumbers, lizards scuttled away in all directions, and a fish flopped in the pool, with a splash that sounded out of all proportion to its exciting cause. Ted grinned as he saw Ace first pinch himself to see if he were dreaming, then slowly feel his joints to make sure none were seriously damaged.

The fall had rather jolted his nerves, but otherwise he was unhurt, as was his chum. But how to return the way they had come they could not see, for the walls were too slippery to climb, there was not a spear of anything movable in sight on which they might gain a foot-hold, and when Ted tried it from Ace’s shoulders, the rim of the well was too slippery with mud for him to gain a hand-hold.

The bats, blind from their lightless lives, bumped against them and added the final touch of weirdness by their gnome-like faces.

With the uncanny feeling that they ought to whisper, the shaking boys started to explore the cavern, which they found led off in three directions. It must be on the same level they had left when they said good-by to Radcliffe, but in their panic they were completely turned around, and they had not explored for ten minutes before they were so confused that they could not even have found their way back to the cavern of the pool.

Now Ted had been lost before. He knew the panic feeling, the sudden sense of utter and helpless isolation, the absurd fearfulness, almost the temporary insanity of it. His scalp prickled, – as did Ace’s, – and for a little while his wits seemed befogged. Then he remembered that bed-rock advice Long Lester had once given him. When you don’t know which way to go, sit down and don’t move one step for half an hour. And try to think out the way you got there, or some plan of campaign for finding yourself again.

Ted had once been lost in the chaparral, – a thorny tangle of low growths that reached higher than his head. When he first discovered he was off the trail, he wandered about as in a mystic maze, till a shred of his own gingham shirt, (caught on a stub of manzanita), told him he had circled.

He had had to spend the night there, but in the end he had stumbled upon the trail again, not ten feet from where he lost it.

As Long Lester afterwards pointed out, had he but blazed his trail from the very first step, he could at least have back-tracked. Or better, if he had with his jack-knife made a blaze sufficiently high on some stunted tree to have seen it and come back to it, he might have circled, and in ever widening circles would surely, in time, have found the trail.

Or, again, he might have – had he known – at least hacked a straight course by the stars, (always provided that he knew in which direction lay the way out).

“Ace,” he managed to steady his voice when they had been seated on a dry ledge for some little time, “your knowledge of cave formations might help us to find the way out of here. Gee! If this was only in the woods, or even on some mountain side above the clouds! But it’s up to you now.”

“Well,” Ace began, “the map of the typical cave, say like Mammoth, wiggles around a little like a river with its tributaries, though nothing like so regularly, with here and there a wider place, and–”

“Here and there,” contributed his chum, “a well to a lower level.”

“Yes. You see, the water that wears a cave out of the softer layers of rock seeps in along the fissures of the surface rock, and at first they make subterranean rivers. Where you find these big springs in the hillsides, they may be the outlets of these underground waterways.”

“I get that, all right,” said Ted.

“Well, then, sometimes these Stygian streams–”

“Keep it up, Professor!” Ted clapped him on the shoulder.

“Huh! – These rivers wear away the soft limestone layer, – if it is this kind of a cave, – ’till they come to the harder sandstone. Then the first chance they find to get through the sandstone, – perhaps through a crack made by an earthquake or something, – they go down and wear away a deeper level. Mammoth Cave is on five levels. That leaves the upper galleries dry. Now the one we were on was dry except for the moisture that is always seeping into a cave, but I suspect now we’re on a level with the river, it’s so muddy, and we’ll find it somewhere.”

“Then we’ll find it somewhere!” brightened Ted. “And we can follow it. That’s the plan of action!” and he jumped to his feet.

“We’ll follow it if we can. Thunder! I wish we had a boat.”

“So long as you’re wishing, why don’t you wish for a fat steak with onions?”

“It has been some time since we ate.” Ace tightened his belt. “Must be getting late in the day! Let’s run!” And run they did, till they began slipping on a muddy slope.

They had to place each foot with care now, and their progress was slow. At the same time their candles were nearly gone. “Now let’s put out all but one,” suggested Ted. “Just burn one at a time. What would we do without any light?” But Ace did not know the answer.

What of Pedro, meantime? At that particular instant he had just tried to make his get-away, with the result that three drawn daggers were being flourished threateningly and most unhealthily near his heart. He had overheard enough evidence to convict all three of the Mexicans, thanks to his knowledge of the parent language, but as the desperadoes pushed farther and farther into the labyrinth, he gathered that they would come out a good safe distance from where they had entered, – probably on the other side of the ridge. Had he known the Ranger’s whereabouts at that precise moment, he would have felt very differently.

Radcliffe, meantime, was staring into the dark recess of the cavern, but all he could see was the two shining eyes of whatever occupant was there. Was it bear or cougar? For both, he knew, took refuge in caves. The largeness of the eyes inclined him to the belief that it was a California mountain lion, and such it was part of his work to exterminate, – though the state also hires an official lion hunter.

That the great cats are cowards he well knew. But this one was cornered, and might prove no mean antagonist. With revolver cocked in his right hand, his lamp in the other, he advanced toward those two shining fires. A faint scratching along the rocky floor warned him that the animal was gathering for a spring. He was still rather far for a revolver shot, but he aimed straight between the eyes. His shot reverberated with a thousand echoes. The sounds, ear-splitting in the smoke-filled gloom, – thundered like a thousand siege guns, it seemed to Radcliffe, stalactites tumbled about his ears like crockery, and more appalling than all the rest was the weird, almost human scream of the wounded animal, which likewise reëchoed for several minutes. The unwitting cause of all this turmoil was in a cold perspiration when things finally quieted down. But the puma, (for such it proved to be), lay dead at his feet.

The three Mexicans likewise heard the racket, for they, as it happened, were not far away. The Ranger had very nearly trailed them. With rolling eyes and hands that mechanically traced the sign of the cross, they listened, while the thunders died away.

Pedro, though his nerves were more than a little shaken, was quick to seize his opportunity. Slipping like an eel through a narrow opening between two columns, where the dripstone had all but closed the way into another chamber, he would have escaped observation entirely had it not been for his betraying torch-light.

Sanchez darted after him. But remember, Sanchez was at least a hundred pounds heavier than even well-fed Pedro. The result might have been expected. He stuck mid-way! And there he dangled his fat legs in an endeavor to free himself, while Pedro doubled with laughter and the other Mexicans stared, too amazed to move.

“Pull, can’t you, pull!” was Pedro’s expurgated version of Sanchez’s reiterated discourse with his followers. And when no one came to his rescue, he nearly burst a blood vessel in his helpless wrath.

Pedro, feeling safe from pursuit, with such a plug in the only approach to his sanctuary, now for the first time disclosed his knowledge of Mexican. Sanchez’s astonishment was as huge as his attitude was undignified, and if words could have seared, Pedro would have been well scorched. But the boy only told him of an item he had read in the paper, where a fat man got stuck in a cave and had to fast for three days before his girth had diminished sufficiently that he could be extricated.

With that, Pedro bade them a fond farewell, and departed along a labyrinthian way they could not follow. That some one was on their trail he suspected from the revolver shot, and the fire bugs would be nicely trapped.

Now the Ranger reasoned that the lion’s den would not be far from the outer world, and in that he was right, as he proved by following it to its end. The last lap of the way he had to wriggle along on hands and knees, but he could see the glow of the setting sun in a circle of light at the end, and in a very few minutes he had poked his head and shoulders beneath an overhanging bowlder on a rock ledge. It was the Southern slope of the spur, and after a little reconnoitering he discovered that it was the selfsame spur on which fire-fighting headquarters had been established. The cave, then, pierced clear through the ridge, and he had been exactly all day in following its windings.

Hiking wearily up the slope to the ridge, he could see the glow of the cook-fire perhaps a mile away, while down in the canyon on the other side the fire still glowed in red embers where it continued to devour the blackened tree trunks, though it was under far better control than it had been the day before.

Rosa’s solicitude at his haggard face and tattered, mud stained clothing restored him wonderfully. (After all, there were compensations in the scheme of things.)

“We were just about to start a search party in there,” said Norris. “I would have before, if it hadn’t been for the fire. But where are the boys?” He paled in alarm.

“I don’t know,” Radcliffe dragged from white lips.

“Oh!” gasped Rosa, her eyes filling with tears which she promptly hid by turning her back.

Without a word Long Lester gathered up the paraphernalia the Ranger now saw he had stacked and ready on the ground, and fitted it into a back-pack. There was food, rope, and candles, another tube of carbide for Radcliffe’s lamp, a box of matches in a tight lidded tin, and even a short length of rustic ladder made for the occasion.

Norris shouldered part of it as by previous agreement.

Radcliffe explained the diagram he tore from his note-book, marking a black cross at the point where he had left the boys.

“I dunno,” said the old prospector, “but what we might as well go in one way as another. I reckon we can folly this yere map backwards as well as forrud, and we’ll just hike down and go in the way you kem out.”

“That’s a go,” agreed Norris, striding after him.

“Oh,” yelled the Ranger after them. “Come back! I’ll deputize you both. Here, Norris,” and he gave the younger man his revolver and cartridge belt, with his official pronouncement.

“I swan!” said Long Lester. “Here I were a-thinkin’ so much about them boys I clean forgot the Mexicans,” and he slung his rifle atop his pack.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SNOW-SLIDE

“I’m glad they got in a few hours’ sleep this noon,” solicitized Rosa, placing homemade bread and coffee before the Ranger, then dipping up a bowl of soup. She looked fagged to death herself, and Radcliffe made her promise to roll up in a blanket on a browse bed.

“Oh, if only it would rain!” she sighed, “and put out the fire!”

“Sure wish it would!” he agreed. “Haven’t had such a big one in years.”

“The DeHaviland was back with more supplies,” one of the men reported.

“It sure takes tons of grub to keep these firemen stoked,” sighed Rosa drowsily from her blankets. “But they work like lumbermen, and I’d give every last man here a medal if I could.”

Norris and Long Lester skirted the South slope its whole length without finding the cave mouth from which Norris had exited. But by now it was dark, and the task doubly difficult. “If it wasn’t for them boys being most likely just plumb panicky from being lost,” said the old man, “I’d call it sense to camp for the night. Once it’s sun-up, we’ll find the place easy enough.”

But Norris was too uneasy to leave any stone unturned. What might not have happened in the hours since he had last seen his charges! His imagination, given free rein, pictured everything from murder to raving mania.

As they neared the head of the gulch, they could see, on the side of the main ridge that towered above them, patches of snow that gleamed white in the star-light. The canyon here headed sharply to the left.

The side they were on, the short side of the turn, was becoming impassable with rough bowlders and tangling underbrush.

Of a sudden a low rumbling sounded faintly from seemingly beneath their feet. The ground wavered dizzily. Trees swayed, rocks started rolling down the canyon side, and the very bowlder they were on tilted till they had to make a quick leap for it. It was just one of the slight earthquake shocks to which all Californians are accustomed. But never before had either Norris or Long Lester been on such dangerous footing when one happened.

Quick as thought, the old man went leaping up over the bowlders, yelling frantically to Norris to follow him. The geologist knew in a theoretical way what to do when a snow-slide threatened, and with that lightning speed with which our minds work in an emergency he had seen that the shock of the ’quake would precipitate snow-slides, and that they were directly in the path of one.

He knew theoretically, – as the old prospector knew from observation of several tragedies, – that the river of snow and rock-slide would flood down canyon till it came to a turn, then hurtle off in fine spray – on the side of the curve! (It all happened in an instant.) Their one salvation lay in taking the short side of the curve, – though the going was rougher.

With the roar of an express train, – whose speed it emulated, – the oncoming slide tore down at them. Down 3,000 feet of canyon the crusted snows of what was still spring at that altitude rushed like a river at flood. The wind of its coming swayed tall trees.

The two men escaped by the skin of their teeth!

“It shore would’a scrambled us up somethin’ turrible!” the old man kept exclaiming.

Next day, he knew, they would find a clean swath cut down the mountain-side, – tall pines swept away, root and branch. He had seen many of these scars, which in later years had become a garden of fire-weed and wild onion, a paradise for birds and squirrels and onion loving bears.

He had seen steep mountains fairly striped by the paths of slides, the forest still growing between stripes. For the steeper the slope, the swifter the slide, as might be expected.

Lucky for them this had been a Southwest slope; for on the North, away from the sun, a slide is even swifter!

He had seen one man buried by crossing the head of a slide which gave way under his foot. Its roar had been heard for miles. Frost-cracked from the solid granite, the side rock that accompanied it had been weathered from the peak. Thus are high mountains worn away.

For perhaps an hour after the near-catastrophe, the air was filled with blinding snow, – not that from the skies, but that of the snow dust raised by the slide.

The circle of the rising moon threw a silver glamor over the scene. “What do you figure makes these ’quakes, anyway?” asked Long Lester.

“The boys have asked that too, and I can’t give it to you all in a breath. But I’ll give you the story before we end this trip.”

At the moment of the earthquake, Ace and Ted, immured on a lower level of the cave, were following a subterranean river. They got well splashed by the waves set up, and worse scared, but it was all over in a minute and they were only a degree more uncomfortably damp than they had been before. Suddenly Ted gave an exclamation. A crag of drip-rock had been shaken from the roof, and there, imbedded in the limestone, lay the plain foot-print of – it might have been a giant!

The boys stared, marveling a moment, then Ted voiced his guess. The fossil of some giant of prehistoric ages! “A fossil, all right,” Ace agreed. “But that isn’t a human footprint, even if there had been men that size. That was made by some animal! If we ever get out of here, let’s bring Norris and come back with picks and find out.”

“Then I can quarry this fossil out and sell it?” ventured Ted.

“Right-o!” with a congratulatory slap that made Ted wince.

But the inky stream had once more become placid, and skirting the muddy ledge alongside, they threaded their way through arches of varying height till finally the roof was so low that they had to go on hands and knees. Then the bank became so narrow that Ace slipped off into the unknown depths. To his surprise, his feet touched bottom. Moreover, the water was not so cold as he had imagined. (It was about the same temperature as the air).

“Come on in, the water’s fine!” he encouraged Ted. “Do you know, we could swim this if we had to, and don’t you think it must lead out?”

“Stands to reason. But how about our candles?”

“Hold ’em in your teeth. Haven’t you ever seen any one smoke a cigarette when he was in swimming? It’s a stunt, but–”

“Ever tried it?”

“Sure. Have you?”

“No.” And the deepening water soon proved that he could not keep his candle going. But Ace managed it for a few strokes. Then they had to swim in darkness. An increasing roar told them that they were nearing white water, possibly the outlet, and just as the current from a branch stream would have caught them, they felt an overhanging ledge and scrambled up on it, Ace lending a hand to his less proficient chum.

From the far end of the tunnel shone a faint glow, as through a sheet of water! They had reached a cave mouth.

Creeping cautiously along the ledge, they approached the light. From its pallor and from the roaring of the rapids they at first thought they were behind a waterfall. But a closer approach showed them that it shone through leaves of plants that grew just outside, where they over-arched the escaping stream (gooseberries, they later found, and other vines that completely hid the exit of the stream).

It was a ticklish proposition getting out along the rock ledge, which narrowed to a mere rough crack into which they could dig the sides of their soles. But by holding hands and clinging with all their might, while they propitiated the law of gravity by leaning their weight against the wall, they slowly scaled a way above the churning stream, and so to where they could cling to the thorny bushes.

It was night. The light had been the moon shining straight into the cave mouth. But where they were, on what side of the ridge, they could not tell.

They were safe, though! Saved from the blind horror of being lost in the cave! But wet and chilled to the marrow now in the night wind that blew down canyon, famished, footsore, and aching for sleep. Still how wonderfully fresh and perfumed everything smelled after the cave.

“Got any matches in your waterproof match box?” asked Ted with chattering teeth, throwing himself flat on the up side of a rock that would keep him from rolling. “Why, this is funny!” for there was no sign of the stream a few yards beyond the cave mouth. They were at the head of some former rock slide, and the stream simply disappeared, percolating underneath it to its destination, (wherever that might be).

But an exclamation from Ace caused him to look in the direction of his pointing arm. In the canyon below them a bon-fire burst into bloom. “The folks?” cried Ace joyously.

“Maybe the Mexicans,” Ted restrained him.

“Let’s slip up on them and find out,” urged the other. “Thunder! Wouldn’t it be great if it was our bunch?”

“All the same, we gotta act just as if it was the Mexicans, till we know for sure.”

“They’ve sure got a good fire,” Ace shivered. “Let’s hurry.”

“All right, maybe it’s Radcliffe come clear through the cave on a higher level, and maybe he’s got the Mexicans.”

“And Pedro?”

“And Pedro!”

“Sure, who else could it be?” they cheered each other.

But it was neither.

CHAPTER IX

TED’S FOSSIL DINOSAUR

An hour later two famished and exhausted boys were peering at the huge bon-fire by which Norris and Long Lester had decided to camp till dawn.

“Wal, durn yer hide, I’m that glad to see you I’ve a notion to wallop you,” the old guide welcomed them. “But I’m not a-goin’ to ask you a single word till you’ve et,” and he proceeded to build up a brighter fire. “Peel off them duds, and roll up here in our blankets whilst we dry things for you.”