CHAPTER X.
TRACKS IN THE DUST.
WHEN Abington came to himself he was in darkness, the lamp having fallen On its side and gone out. Whether he had fainted, slept or merely lost consciousness for a moment he could not tell, nor did he ponder it much. The fact that his toes hung over the edge set him crawling forward on his hands and knees, obeying the primal instinct of self-preservation.
He wanted no more of that particular abysm. Until he had put several yards between himself and what seemed to him now a black, bottomless void, he did not think of the lamp.
When he finally forced himself to stop and light it he discovered that he was in a fairly level passage, the walls covered with carvings wherein the same chain of evil predominated. These hieroglyphics won only a cursory glance, however, as he got painfully upon his feet and started forward, steadying himself against the wall as he went.
A cool breath of air in his face was his first intimation that he was nearing the outdoor world. In spite of a stiffness in his joints and muscles he found himself moving almost at a run and the consciousness of his nervous haste brought a faint grin of amusement to his face. John Abington was more anxious to see daylight than he ever had been in his life—and the first man to laugh over the experience would be John Abington himself.
Nevertheless he did not slacken his pace until he arrived at a sharp turning where a gray light dimmed the white flame of his lamp.
He stopped before a crack twice the width of his palm, through which the dawn wind came blowing gratefully in his face. Directly across from him, but fifty feet lower and separated by a hundred- foot chasm, a broad ridge extended out into the valley; and as he looked two bighorn sheep came trotting up a faint trail and disappeared among the higher crags.
“That's where the shooting took place,” Abington told himself. “Wonder if Bill's been hunting? Took my rifle. Have to give it back. Well—at least I can see daylight!”
The lazy clouds above the valley blossomed suddenly into radiant hues. The gaunt hills blushed and the cañons all seemed bathed in crimson and yellow flames. As through the narrow window of a belfry tower, Abington gazed down on a world of magnificent peaks and crags flaunting their bold reds and yellow beneath a redder sunrise.
For the moment the scene held him, then he turned back to the problem of finding a way out; for although a glimpse of the outside world was heartening, he could not squeeze through an eight-inch split in the rock. There must be some other exit. He turned away from the window and went on.
The passage took another twist and he entered a roughly outlined room into which the daylight seeped through several fissures between the shattered blocks of sandstone; high overhead most of them were, although two or three were low enough to serve as narrow windows.
A square boulder, the top hollowed in the shape of a rounded trough, stood in the center of the chamber. Otherwise the room was empty, unless the intricate mass of carved symbols might be classed as furnishings, for the walls were covered with them.
Abington's spirits rose, though he paid little attention to the writings. To him they proved, as did the boulder which he recognized as a sacrificial altar, that this was a chamber much used by the ancients. Since the route by which he had entered could not be called a thoroughfare, there would be another way out, possibly several.
Within two minutes he had found the passage, and something else. There on the rock floor which slanted down from the chamber on the side opposite the one by which he had entered, was a cigarette stub; it was one of the oval kind he himself always smoked. He stooped and picked it up, his black eyebrows lifted in surprise.
“Never reached this point yesterday—h'm! Bill not only borrowed my gun and went hunting last night, but did a little exploring on his own account. Looking for me, perhaps. No, Bill was scouting around for himself. H'm! Growing surly and quarrelsome, pretending a distrust he can't actually feel, hoping I'd give him an excuse to turn on me. Wonder, now, if Bill didn't raid his own cave and hide the stuff!
“A full burro load of grub—with gun and ammunition he could live all winter—h'm!” He went on: “Looking now for a hideout—place where I can't find him! Bill, my lad, you should pay more attention to details; one little oversight—such as a cigarette stub—has hanged a man before now. A good inch and a half of tobacco wasted here. You'll be wanting a cigarette very badly, Bill, before you get another supply, remember.”
He laid the stub down where he had found it and went on, haggard eyes peering this way and that, seeking further signs of the traitor's presence. If Bill had been looking for his partner, then it was an odd twist of circumstance that had sent them both wandering around in the same labyrinth of caves and complicated katabothra without once permitting them to meet. If, on the other hand, Bill had been hunting a hiding place which Abington would never find—and the archæologist was certain this was the case—he had a surprise in store.
Just now Abington wanted most of all to get out of there and find his way back to their camp, where there should be food. If not—well, he had his automatic; he had seen game; and he was a fairly accurate shot. He would not starve.
The passage sharply descended, as so many others had done. Abington went cautiously, lighting both walls and watching for obscure openings which for all he knew might be the one he should take. This whole country seemed to have been the playground of Vulcan, who rent mountains asunder, twisted whole ranges of hills and broke them into fragments and flung them aside when fresh land appeared above the great Sonora Sea and caught his sportive fancy.
Just here the shattered formation of the old volcanic fissure lay in blocks that had been roughly hewn into the crude semblance of steps, down which Abington went slowly, choosing his footing with the deliberation of excessive weariness. His thirty-six-hour fast and that terrific climb up from the Pool of Evil Death—from the writings he had so named the place—had taken more out of him than he realized, until he began to negotiate this rather difficult descent. But he kept going, that cigarette stub serving now to urge him forward.
STUMBLING from hunger and weariness, Abington emerged into another cavern of considerable extent and showing unmistakable signs of human occupancy in bygone ages. Crude pots—most of them broken—stood against the walls. Stone implements of various kinds, all thickly covered with dust, lay scattered about; and on the dust-strewn floor were the plain imprints of hiking boots. Bill, then, had visited this cavern, which proved that so far Abington had kept to the right trail.
Tilting the lamp so that the light shone on the floor, he went forward, following the boot tracks in the dust. Through winding passages they led him—Abington might have become lost again had not those footprints pointed the way—and so into a chamber where was piled a little heap of things which Abington recognized as a part of his own outfit and the things Bill had declared were stolen from his cave across the valley.
The treachery of the act stabbed through Abington's weary consciousness and merged into a malicious satisfaction. At any rate the spot had been well chosen, for here was water trickling down a rift in the wall, tinkling into a tiny basin hewn out of the rock by some other hands than Bill's.
Abington sank to his knees and drank thirstily, then clawed at the pile of stuff, found a tin of corned beef and cut it open with his knife. It was not what he would have chosen for a meal, but it would serve. There was plenty of water at hand. He ate all of the corned beef, drank again and withdrew to a sandy niche where he felt fairly sure of hearing Bill if he returned; laid himself down under a shelving projection of rock, put out his lamp and went thankfully to sleep.