Silence reigned for an instant, then Jonas McCrill's wrathful voice: "I told yuh he was a-hidin' here!
Come outa there--he's got clean away."
The old fighter's rangy frame rose up from behind the rock where he had taken refuge. Reynolds, grinning fiercely, took steady aim, then some instinct of self-preservation held his hand. The others came out into the open.
"What are we a-waitin' on?" yelled young Bill Ord, tears of rage in his eyes. "Here that coyote's done shot Saul and's ridin' hell-for-leather away from here, and we're a-standin' 'round jawin'. I'm a-goin'
to--" He started for his horse.
"Yuh're a-goin' to listen to me!" roared old Jonas. "I warned yuh-all to go slow--but yuh would come lickety-split along like a bunch of blind buzzards, and now Saul's layin' there dead. lf we ain't careful John Reynolds'll kill all of us. Did I tell yuh-all he was here? Likely stopped to rest his horse. He can't go far. This here's a long hunt, like I told yuh at first. Let him get a good start. Long as he's ahead of us, we got to watch out for ambushes. He'll try to git back onto the Reynolds range. Well, we're a-goin' after him slow and easy and keep him hazed back all the time. We'll be a-ridin' the inside of a big half-circle and he can't get by us--not on that short-winded mustang. We'll just foller him and gather him in when his horse can't do no more. And I purty well know where he'll come to bay at--Blind Horse Canyon."
"We'll have to starve him out, then," growled Jack Solomon.
"No, we won't," grinned old Jonas. "Bill, yuh high-tail it back to Antelope and git five or six sticks of dynamite. Then you git a fresh horse and follow our trail. If we catch him before he gits to the canyon, all right. If he beats us there and holes up, we'll wait for yuh, and then blast him out."
"What about Saul?" growled Peter Ord.
"He's dead," grunted Jonas. "Nothin' we can do for him now. No time to take him back." He glanced up at the sky, where already black dots wheeled against the blue. His gaze drifted to the walled-up mouth of the cavern in the steep cliff which rose at right angles to the slope up which the path wandered.
"We'll break open that cave and put him in it," he said. "We'll pile up the rocks again and the wolves and buzzards can't git to him. May be several days before we git back."
"That cave's ha'nted," uneasily muttered Bill Ord. "The Injuns always said if yuh put a dead man in there, he'd come a-walkin' out at midnight."
"Shet up and help pick up pore Saul," snapped Jonas. "Here's your own kin a-layin' dead, and his murderer a-ridin' further away every second, and you talk about ha'nts."
As they lifted the corpse, Jonas drew the long-barreled six-shooter from the holster and shoved the weapon into his own waist-band.
"Pore Saul," he grunted. "He's shore dead. Shot plumb through the heart. Dead before he hit the ground, I reckon. Well, we'll make them damned Reynoldses pay for it."
They carried the dead man to the cave and, laying him down, attacked the rocks which blocked the entrance. These were soon torn aside, and Reynolds saw the men carry the body inside. They emerged almost immediately, minus their burden, and mounted their horses. Young Bill Ord swung away down the valley and vanished among the trees, and the rest cantered up the winding trail that led up into the hills.
They passed within a hundred feet of his refuge and John Reynolds hugged the earth, fearing discovery.
But they did not glance in his direction. He heard the dwindling of their hoofs over the rocky path, then silence settled again over the ancient valley.
John Reynolds rose cautiously, looked about him as a hunted wolf looks, then made his way quickly down the slope. He had a very definite purpose in mind. A single unfired cartridge was all his ammunition; but about the dead body of Saul Fletcher was a belt well filled with .45 calibre cartridges.
As he attacked the rocks heaped in the cave's mouth, there hovered in his mind the curious dim speculations which the cave and the valley itself always roused in him. Why had the Indians named it the Valley of the Lost, which white men shortened to Lost Valley? Why had the red men shunned it? Once in the memory of white men, a band of Kiowas, fleeing the vengeance of Bigfoot Wallace and his rangers, had taken up their abode there and fallen on evil times. The survivors of the tribe had fled, telling wild tales in which murder, fratricide, insanity, vampirism, slaughter and cannibalism had played grim parts.
Then six white men, brothers, Stark by name, had settled in Lost Valley. They had reopened the cave which the Kiowas had blocked up. Horror had fallen on them and in one night five died by one anothers'
hands. The survivor had walled up the cave mouth again and departed, where none knew, though word had drifted through the settlements of a man named Stark who had come among the remnants of those Kiowas who had once lived in Lost Valley and, after a long talk with them, had cut his own throat with his bowie knife.
What was the mystery of Lost Valley, if not a web of lies and legends? What the meaning of those crumbling stones which, scattered all over the valley, half hidden in the climbing growth, bore a curious symmetry, especially in the moonlight, so that some people believed when the Indians swore they were the half-destroyed columns of a prehistoric city which once stood in Lost Valley? Reynolds himself had seen, before it crumbled into a heap of grey dust, a skull unearthed at the base of a cliff by a wandering prospector, which seemed neither Caucasian nor Indian--a curious, peaked skull, which but for the formation of the jaw-bones might have been that of some unknown antediluvian animal.
Such thoughts flitted vaguely and momentarily through John Reynolds' mind as he dislodged the boulders, which the McCrills had put back loosely, just firmly enough to keep a wolf or buzzard from squeezing through. In the main his thoughts were engrossed with the cartridges in dead Saul Fletcher's belt. A fighting chance! A lease on life! He would fight his way out of the hills yet--would gather the remnants of his clan and strike back. He would bring in more gunmen and cutthroats to reinforce the thinning ranks.
He would flood the whole range with blood and bring the countryside to ruin, if by those means he might be avenged. For years he had been the moving factor in the feud. When even old Esau had weakened and wished for peace, John Reynolds had kept the flame of hate blazing. The feud had become his one driving motive--his one interest in life and reason for existence. The last boulders fell aside.
John Reynolds stepped into the semi-gloom of the cavern. It was not large but the shadows seemed to cluster there in almost tangible substance. Slowly his eyes accustomed themselves; an involuntary exclamation broke from his lips--the cave was empty! He swore in bewilderment. He had seen men carry Saul Fletcher's corpse into the cave and come out again, empty handed. Yet no corpse lay on the dusty cavern floor. He went to the back of the cave, glanced at the straight, even wall, bent and examined the smooth rock floor. His keen eyes, straining in the gloom, made out a dull smear of blood on the stone. It ended abruptly at the back wall, and there was no stain on the wall.
Reynolds leaned closer, supporting himself by a hand propped against the stone wall. And suddenly and shockingly the sensation of solidity and stability vanished. The wall gave way beneath his propping hand, a section swung inward, precipitating him headlong through a black gaping opening. His catlike quickness could not save him. It was as if the yawning shadows reached tenuous and invisible hands to jerk him headlong into the darkness.
He did not fall far. His outflung hands struck what seemed to be steps carved in the stone, and on them he scrambled and floundered for an instant. Then he righted himself and turned back to the opening through which he had fallen. The secret door had closed and only a smooth stone wall met his groping fingers. He fought down a rising panic. How the McCrills had come to know of this secret chamber he could not say, but quite evidently they had placed Saul Fletcher's body in it. And there, trapped like a rat, they would find John Reynolds when they returned. Then in the darkness a grim smile curled Reynolds' thin lips. When they opened the secret door, he would be hidden in the darkness, whil
e they would be etched against the dim light of the outer cave. Where could he find a more perfect ambush? But first he must find the body and secure the cartridges.
He turned to grope his way down the steps and his first stride brought him to a level floor. It was a sort of narrow tunnel, he decided, for though he could not touch the roof, a stride to the right or the left and his outstretched hand encountered a wall, seemingly too even and symmetrical to have been a work of nature. He went slowly, groping in the darkness, keeping in touch with the walls and momentarily expecting to stumble on Saul Fletcher's body. And as he did not, a dim horror began to grow in his soul.
The McCrills had not been in the cavern long enough to carry the body so far back into the darkness. A feeling was rising in John Reynolds that the McCrills had not entered the tunnel at all--that they were not aware of its existence. Then where, in the name of sanity, was Saul Fletcher's corpse?
He stopped short, jerking out his six-shooter. Something was coming up the dark tunnel--something that walked upright and lumberingly.
John Reynolds knew it was a man, wearing high-heeled riding boots; no other foot-wear makes the same stilted sound. He caught the jingle of the spurs. And a dark tide of nameless horror moved sluggishly in John Reynolds' mind as he heard that halting tread approach, and remembered the night when he had lain at bay in the old corral, with his younger brother dying beside him, and heard a limping, dragging footstep endlessly circle his refuge, out in the night where Saul Fletcher led his wolves and sought for a way to come upon his back.
Had the man only been wounded? These steps sounded stiff and blundering, such as a wounded man might make. No--John Reynolds had seen too many men die; he knew that his bullet had gone straight through Saul Fletcher's heart--possibly tearing the heart clear out, certainly killing him instantly. Besides, he had heard old Jonas McCrill declare the man was stone-dead. No--Saul Fletcher lay lifeless somewhere in this black cavern. It was some other lame man who was coming up that silent tunnel.
Now the tread ceased. The man was fronting him, separated only by a few feet of utter blackness. What was there in that to quicken the iron pulse of John Reynolds, who had unflinchingly faced death times without number?--what to make his flesh crawl and his tongue freeze to his palate?--to awake sleeping instincts of fear as a man senses the presence of an unseen serpent, and make him feel that somehow the other was aware of his presence with eyes that pierced the darkness?
In the silence John Reynolds heard the staccato pounding of his own heart. And with shocking suddenness the man lunged. Reynolds' straining ears caught the first movement of that lunge and he fired point-blank. And he screamed--a terrible animal-like scream. Heavy arms locked upon him and unseen teeth worried at his flesh, but in the frothing frenzy of his fear, his own strength was superhuman. For in the flash of the shot he had seen a bearded face with slack hanging mouth and staring dead eyes. Saul Fletcher! The dead, come back from Hell.
As in a nightmare Reynolds knew that fiendish battle in the dark, where the dead sought to drag down the living. He felt himself hurled to and fro in the grip of the clammy hands. He was flung with bone-shattering force against the stone walls. Dashed to the floor, the silent horror squatted ghoul-like upon him, its horrid fingers sinking deep into his throat.
In that nightmare, John Reynolds had no time to doubt his own sanity. He knew that he was battling a dead man. The flesh of his foe was cold with a charnel-house clamminess. Under the torn shirt he had felt the round bullet-hole, caked with clotted blood. No single sound came from the loose lips.
Choking and gasping, John Reynolds tore the strangling hands aside and flung the thing off, reeling. For an instant the darkness again separated them; then the horror came hurtling toward him again. As the thing lunged Reynolds caught blindly and gained the wrestling hold he wished; and hurling all his power behind his attack, he dashed the horror headlong, falling upon it with his full weight. Saul Fletcher's spine snapped like a rotten branch and the tearing hands went limp, the straining limbs relaxed. Something flowed from the lax body and whispered away through the darkness like a ghostly wind, and John Reynolds instinctively knew that at last Saul Fletcher was truly dead.
Panting and shaken, Reynolds rose. The tunnel remained in utter darkness. But down it, in the direction from which the walking corpse had come stalking, there whispered a faint throbbing that was hardly sound at all, yet had in its pulsing a dark weird music. Reynolds shuddered and the sweat froze on his body. The dead man lay at his feet in the thick darkness and faintly to his ears came that unbearably sweet, unbearably evil echo, like devil-drums beating faint and far in the dim caverns of Hell.
Reason urged him to turn back--to fight against that blind door until he burst its stone, if human power could burst it. But he realized that reason and sanity had been left behind him. A single step had plunged him from a normal world of material realities into a realm of nightmare and lunacy. He decided that he was mad, or else dead and in Hell. Those dim tom-toms drew him--they tugged at his heart-strings eerily.
They repelled him and filled his soul with shadowy and monstrous conjectures, yet their call was irresistible. He fought the mad impulse to shriek and fling his arms wildly aloft and run down the black tunnel as a rabbit runs down the prairie dog's burrow into the jaws of the waiting rattler.
Fumbling in the dark, he found his revolver and still fumbling, he loaded it with cartridges from Saul Fletcher's belt. He felt no more aversion now at touching the body than he would have felt at handling any dead flesh. Whatever unholy power had animated the corpse, it had left it when the snapping of the spine had unraveled the nerve centers and disrupted the roots of the muscular system.
Then, revolver in hand, John Reynolds went down the tunnel, drawn by a power he could not fathom, toward a doom he could not guess.
The throb of the tom-toms grew only slightly in volume as he advanced. How far below the hills he was he could not know, but the tunnel slanted downward and he had gone a long way. Often his groping hands encountered doorways--corridors leading off the main tunnel, he believed. At last he was aware that he had left the tunnel and had come out into a vast open space. He could see nothing, but he somehow felt the vastness of the place. And in the darkness a faint light began. It throbbed as the drums throbbed, waning and waxing in time to their pulsing, but it grew slowly, casting a weird glow that was more like green than any color Reynolds had ever seen, but was not really green, nor any other sane or earthly color.
Reynolds approached it. It widened. It cast a shimmering radiance over the smooth stone floor, illuminating fantastic mosaics. It cast its sheen high in the hovering shadows, but he could see no roof.
Now he stood bathed in its weird glow, so that his flesh looked like a dead man's. Now he saw the roof, high and vaulted, brooding far above him like a dusky midnight sky, and towering walls, gleaming and dark, sweeping up to tremendous heights, their bases fringed with squat shadows from which glittered other lights, small and scintillant.
He saw the source of the illumination--a strange carven stone altar on which burned what appeared to be a giant jewel of an unearthly hue, like the light it emitted. Greenish flame jetted from it; it burned as a bit of coal might burn, but it was not consumed. Just behind it a feathered serpent reared from its coils, a fantasy carven of some clear crystalline substance the tints of which in the weird light were never the same, but which pulsed and shimmered and changed as the drums--now on all sides of him--pulsed and throbbed.
Abruptly something alive moved beside the altar and John Reynolds, though he was expecting anything, recoiled. At first he thought it a huge reptile which slithered about the altar, then he saw that it stood upright as a man stands. As he met the menacing glitter of its eyes, he fired point-blank and the thing went down like a slaughtered ox, its skull shattered. Reynolds wheeled as a sinister rustling rose on his ears--at least these beings could be killed. Then he checked the lifted muzzle. The drums had never ceased. The fringing sha
dows had moved out from the darkness at the base of the walls and drawn about him in a wide ring. And though at first glance they possessed the semblance of men, he knew they were not human.
The weird light flickered and danced over them, and back in the deeper darkness the soft, evil drums whispered their accompanying undertone everlastingly. John Reynolds stood aghast at what he saw.
It was not their dwarfish figures which caused his shudder, nor even the unnaturally made hands and feet--it was their heads. He knew, now, of what race was the skull found by the prospector. Like it, these heads were peaked and malformed, curiously flattened at the sides. There was no sign of ears, as if their organs of hearing, like a serpent's, were beneath the skin. The noses were like a python's snout, the mouth and jaws much less human in appearance than his recollection of the skull would have led him to suppose. The eyes were small, glittering and reptilian. The squamous lips writhed back, showing pointed fangs, and John Reynolds felt that their bite would be as deadly as a rattlesnake's. Garments they wore none, nor did they bear any weapons.
He tensed himself for the death-struggle, but no rush came. The snake-people sat about him in a great cross-legged circle, and beyond the circle he saw them massed thick. And now he felt a stirring in his consciousness, an almost tangible beating of wills upon his senses. He was distinctly aware of a concentrated invasion of his innermost mind, and realized that these fantastic beings were seeking to convey their commands or wishes to him by medium of thought. On what common plane could he meet these inhuman creatures? Yet in some dim, strange, telepathic way they made him understand some of their meaning, and he realized with a grisly shock that whatever these things were now, they had once been at least partly human, else they had never been able to so bridge the gulf between the completely human and the completely bestial.
The Best Horror Stories of Page 35