by Don Wilcox
“Why . . . don’t . . . you . . . ask me . . . about . . . your friend?”
I gulped. I reached out to steady Maxie. He was about to go over again. He stammered something. “You—you talk our language?”
“I. . . speak . . . every . . . tongue,” came the low, fluttering whisper. Her wings spread a trifle and she tilted her bead with an air of pride. “I . . . have . . . need . . . to know . . . the words . . . of every man and woman. . . condemned . . . to live . . . in the desert . . . of the damned.”
The desert of the damned! Condemned to live here! Maxie and I both echoed the awful words. With one accord we moved out of her gaze. Somehow by common consent we shuffled back into the darkness. We threaded our way past scrubby trees and bushes, over rocks, down the grade, and down and down, until our feet were on the flat sand again.
We hardly spoke, all the way back to the Green Tooth that rose black and massive against the stars. It seemed that we hardly dared admit to each other that we had seen and heard these strange things.
As we were bedding down in the bushes for a short night’s sleep, I said to Maxie, “We broke and ran like a couple of ninnies. Do you know what we forgot?”
“What?”
“To let her answer our question about Wells. I’ve got a hunch she knows where he is.”
“I’ve got a hunch,” said Maxie, “that it wouldn’t be pleasant to hear. I figure she’s quick death for anything that falls her way . . . Say, what did she mean about being condemned to live in the desert of the damned?”
CHAPTER XIII
The Goddess Tells
The troubles we had on our hands couldn’t be handled in one day—or two. We hated to settle down to the business of routine living right here in the midst of murderous flesh eaters. But we had work to do.
Twenty times a day Maxie would say, “The gang’ll get restless if we don’t report back. They’ll figure we and the lieutenant have given them the slip.” To which I would answer in a surly voice, “The gang be hanged. They’re comfortable. Their ignorance is bliss. If they get anxious about us, let them come over and help. There’s plenty of caverns left to be searched.”
Maxie would gaze across the eastern flat till his eyes burned. I tried to keep up with our foot-by-foot search among the tunnels. But he was set in his notion that Wells was lost. It took all the pep-falks I could muster to keep him on the job.
Meanwhile we had to keep the German and ourselves fed and watered—at the same time keeping out of sight of every chance pair of wings. This was a full-time job in itself. There were plenty of sand rats, but we had to be cautious about building fires. There were a few edible berries and fleshy weeds. Most of the roots were too bitter. I’d have given my last five for one medium sized Irish potato.
Our trips down through the tunnels to that fresh water river named Hammerstein were always perilous. We had to learn the whole maze of intertwining tunnels, eventually, to be ready for any passing emergency.
Some good luck arrived at our doorstep early one morning. One of the gang came across the flat.
The other three had chosen to remain on the east side. But they had pledged Slim to signal back to them when he found how things were going over here. They’d be watching, mornings and evenings, through the binoculars.
Besides his long, bony, somber face and his usual shuffling and awkward manners, and his scanty, frayed garments, Slim Winkle also brought some matches, a cake of soap, and—praise St. Patrick!—a pocket shaving outfit.
“I knew you birds would be needin’ a shave,” he said, unsmiling. “Too many whiskers and you’ll get yourselves mixed up with winged man . . . Where’s Wells?”
“Oh—Wells?” said Maxie. “He’s—er—say, where is Wells this morning, Mac?”
“Oh, he’s around,” I said. “Dibs on the razor. Yours, Slim?”
“I borrowed it off the French sergeant just before I left. He’s missed it by now. Told me he’d kill me if I borrowed any more stuff off him. He’s gittin’ pretty cocky, Franz is, tryin’ to run the other three of us. So I took his razor . . . Where’d you say Wells was?”
“He’s lost,” I said. “We don’t know where he is.”
“Lost? Wells ain’t a guy to get lost.”
“That’s what makes it bad, Slim. We’ve been searching till we’re black in the face. Begorra, we need your help.”
We took him into our confidence, in a limited way. His face clouded when he began to gather the implications.
“The fellows aren’t gonna like it,” Maxie said, not to make the situation any more palatable.
“I’ll signal them to come across and help us search,” said Slim. “They’ll be only too glad to pay back some of Wells’ favors. Only I wouldn’t count on too much help from that French sergeant. He don’t stay hitched for nobody. I’ll signal them—”
“Wait til morning,” I said.
“Why?”
“There’s a reason,” I said. “If too many of us show ourselves on this mountain we’ll be seen, sure. All seven of us would practically be an invitation to a dinner party—”
“A fireless barbecue,” said Max.
Slim didn’t quarrel over the matter but he still thought he should signal right away. But Max and I hadn’t forgot our weird visit of the previous night, and we were holding a secret hope that we might go back to the goddess of white flames. Go back and get the information about Wells that we had missed.
That night we did go back.
We had left Slim at our camp in the bushes, and had slipped away on the pretext of an errand. But before we got half way up the round domed hill he overtook us.
“I was afraid you birds would get lost,” he said. “Sure you know where you’re going?”
“Just a midnight stroll,” said Maxie. “Our old desert habits. An hour to kill so we go for a walk.”
“Tell it to the postman,” said Slim. “All right, you’re a right guy, Slim,” I said. “We’re taking you with us. Whatever Maxie and I see, you’ll see it too. We might as well all three be crazy.”
Slim surmised that he had let himself in for something mysterious, and he didn’t miss. Within a few minutes the three of us were looking down into the well of magic fire.
“Heat waves,” Slim said. He repeated it about sixteen times as if it was all he could say. Each time he said it with less breath, as if something was knocking the wind out of him.
That something was the goddess of white flames. Just to see her was enough to stagger you. But to hear her whisper—well, it’s hard to explain to anyone who never had the privilege. How such a faint, fluttery vibration could set your nerves all a-tingle from your eardrums to your toes was positively frightening.
“You . . . have . . . come . . . back,” she said, “to . . . ask . . . me . . . about . . . Wells.”
Maxie and I were both keeping a firm grip on Slim to make sure he wouldn’t leap over, the way we had started to do. For again she was rising in the fiery shaft, reaching her white hand upward. The little pinkish flames of her lips curved in an enticing smile.
“Come,” she said. “I will whisper . . . the secret . . . in your ears.”
She floated upward higher and higher, until her hand almost touched the upper edge of the wall. We drew back. I could feel hot puffs of air against my cheeks. I jerked my hands backward as the hair on my fingers singed.
“Are you . . . listening?” Her whisper was very close to my ears—much too close for comfort. I couldn’t see her now. But I saw Slim gazing straight over the top of the wall, as if he could see her floating in the heat waves above the surface of the hill. He didn’t try to run as we had done, but stood his ground, staring in rapt wonderment.
“Where—where is he?” said Slim hesitantly.
“He is nesting,” came the whisper from the translucent heat waves, “on the very pinnacle . . . of the mountain . . . which you call . . . the Green Tooth.”
I watched Slim’s eyes. His gaze descended slowly, and I knew he w
as seeing her sink back into the fiery pit. It was curious to see him smile that way. Slim didn’t often smile.
Now she again became visible to my eyes, floating downward like a million tiny flames, tiny flowing flames like little streams of illuminated liquids, white, pink, platinum and silver.
The last I remember of that visit, the reflected light of the goddess was still burning in Slim’s eyes, and he was still sending down his curious smile toward the sinking flames, now fifty feet below us.
Maxie saw too, and he gave me a look as if to say, “Poor Slim, that freakish fire has really got him going.”
Slim didn’t say much on our night’s hike back to camp. But Maxie and I, now being veterans of these mysterious by-paths, felt qualified to discuss the whys and wherefores of her secret knowledge like two unsentimental scientists.
“When you boil it down,” I said, “we don’t know just how she got her inside information. We’re not exactly positive that she’s right. Not till daylight gives us a chance to climb up there. He may be there alive. He may be there dead.”
“I don’t doubt she’s right,” said Maxie. “Fact is, I think she only spends her nights in the fiery furnace. I think she gets around and picks up all the gossip through the daytime. Otherwise, how would she have known he was up there? She can’t look down on that pinnacle from her hilltop. She must get around—or how would she know all the different languages?”
“What bothers me,” I said, “is, what’s her game? Is she aiming to help us straight through? This business of our being condemned to live in a land of the damned sounds to me like we’re only puppets and playthings to her.”
“That’s what I say,” said Maxie. “You just know that she could have reached right up and pulled the three of us overboard if she’d wanted to. She’s got something up her sleeve.”
“She didn’t have a sleeve,” said Slim sourly. “I took special notice—”
“Then she’s got something up her wing feathers,” said Maxie.
“I don’t like it the way you’re talking her down,” said Slim, getting more serious than he usually got about anything.
“Well, if we find Wells it’s a feather in her hat,” I said. “We’ve no reason to distrust her, except we know she’s quick about burning any bodies that get tossed her way.”
“Just so she hasn’t got Wells,” said Maxie. “By the way, Slim. If we find him, you won’t have to signal any bad news to the rest of the gang. They can stay where they’re safe, and we’ll hike over and join them.”
“By now they’re already on their way over here,” said Slim. “Now don’t get mad at me. I figured you needed them, for more reasons than one. So I signalled them this afternoon to pack up and come on over.”
CHAPTER XIV
Franz and the Gang
They arrived at dawn two days later, and the first crack from Franz Cobert was, “Who the devil ran off with my razor?”
The French sergeant shot the question at Slim, who only stared at him with a wry frown. The sergeant’s whiskers, thus singled out for our attention, made him a bit ridiculous. Maxie stepped up and tweaked his cheek.
“Hey, there, Frizzlepuss, have you seen anything of a sergeant named Cobert?”
That made the sarge mad. He glared hard at us. We were all three cleanshaven this morning. He and his three companions had the run-down look of vagabonds who have hoofed it across the Sahara.
“Get us to your camp,” he snapped, “and be quick about it.”
“We’ll have to make a safer camp,” said Slim. “These winged men don’t give us much rest around here.”
“Why hasn’t Wells already provided it?” said Sergeant Cobert.
“Wells isn’t here,” said Slim. “That’s what I tried to tell you when I signalled—”
“Then I’m in command,” said Cobert. “Lead us to your camp and give these men some food and water.”
They needed it, no doubt about that. It was evident that Franz Cobert had treated himself to the best share of the canteens. The two Smiths were dragging, about to drop. Whitey Everett’s lips were parched and swollen and his eyes were almost like a dead man’s.
Whitey Everett mumbled the name of Wells. The Smiths, too, registered curiosity about his not being here. But the sarge told them to shut up and come on. It was time to get ourselves out of sight for the day. The winged men had already made their appearance in the skies to the south.
We hiked around the base of the Green Tooth, picked up our scanty supplies, and pushed on to the west to establish a new camp. It was an all day’s job, moving from cover to cover in search of a suitable place. But a very valuable maneuver, as later events proved, for it removed us from the more active danger zone of Green Tooth.
We settled in a cavernous bank in the low hills nearly a mile to the west of Green Tooth. The winged creatures didn’t often come this way. Their routes were quite well defined. Except when hunting food or chasing a victim they customarily flew from peak to peak.
More definitely, they flew back and forth over the ranges that led to the octagon. Only a few of them—as Maxie and I had observed—came as far north as the Green Tooth. Rarely more than eight.
During the past two days we had followed the comings and goings of these eight. We had decided that they were the same eight who had held the powwow down in the cinnamon roll tunnel. This was evidently one of their exclusive haunts.
Although they would fly south to join their hundreds of cousins elsewhere, they didn’t welcome any intruders in this vicinity. The treatment which they had meted to that one rash spy proved that fhey weren’t in favor of making the Green Tooth caverns an open house.
For the past two days, following our second visit to the goddess of white flames, some of these eight winged men had hung around the pinnacle of the Green Tooth so much that we hadn’t had a chance to try communicating with Wells—if, indeed, he was up there.
We had watched from safe distances, always in hopes of seeing a finely shaped human head and a pair of husky shoulders show themselves at the point of the rocky tower. Often we saw Orchid Wings. But not Wells.
It had been a discouraging and painful vigil. He might be there—alive, a prisoner. Or ill, perhaps unconscious.
He might be there, dead. Or worse, slowly dying, thirsting, too weak to call.
We gave Franz Cobert a few evasive answers when he got around to inquiring more about Wells’ absence. It was too obvious that Cobert was pleased to be in command—that he would be displeased to have Wells return. So we knew better than to confide the whole truth, much less to discuss our rescue plans with the half-French sarge.
The water supply at our new camp was not plentiful, another reason why the winged men didn’t come this way. It was a seepage spring in the ledge that soaked away in the sandy slope without ever forming a stream. But Slim went to work on it, gouging an oblique trough in the ledge that caught the seepage and led it into a rock basin. It was clean and cool and plentiful as long as we didn’t waste it.
That first afternoon proved our change an advantageous one. I had to admit that Franz Cobert had used good judgment in his choice. While the sun baked the west side of Green Tooth, we watched from our cool, shadowed ledge. With the aid of the binoculars we could keep tab on the comings and goings of the six winged men and two women over the Green Tooth.
The more we watched the more we wondered. Were those eight pairs of wings intentionally looping the loop for some mysterious purpose—or was that just their natural way of enjoying the evening air?
“I don’t like the look of that,” said Maxie. “They’re starting in on another ceremony.”
When the procession of wings darted down into the cavern entrances and disappeared, I felt easier, somehow. For once their ceremonial rigamarole hadn’t involved any victim, so far as we could see.
And all this while, strange as it may seem, I still held to my faith in the flame goddess’ word—that Wells was somehow “nesting” on the towering pinnacle.
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“If we could only be sure they’d stay down in the tunnels through the night,” said Maxie, “we’d climb that tower before sun-up.”
We were favored with a fairly dark night, and the three of us—Maxie, Slim, and I—meant to make the most of it. By the time we left camp, Sergeant Cobert was sawing heavy logs in harmony with his three desert-weary companions.
On the way up the side of the Green Tooth we stopped to care for our German prisoner. In another day or two we would move him to our hills where we could keep an eye on him.
We found him mumbling mathematical formulas in a guttural tongue. We told him he was crazy with the heat. But he swallowed a canteen of water and went right on with his problem in logarithms. A smart guy, all right. Still, it wasn’t hard to guess that he was clinging to his notion of bringing in a German army to conquer this land. And in view of what was happening in Europe, that wasn’t too smart. That army had its hands full.
We left “Old Cheesepuss” to his mathematical solitude, and hurried on.
The stars were just bright enough to warn us. No, this wasn’t the night to climb the rocky pinnacle. We’d never make it. That procession of wings was going on again!
Black against the stars, they circled like giant bats—eight of them. In the darkness we couldn’t tell which were the athletic young huskies, which was the old woman, or which was the beautiful Orchid Wings. But the audible flutter of wings and the occasional chortle of their foreign voices warned us that this was a native ritual. It was a party that three uninvited guests named Winkle, Hammerstein and McCorkle would do well not to crash.
Down on the flat we made use of the remaining hours of the night writing a message in the sand.
We wrote it in huge letters. I remember scraping my feet across the sand in twelve long strides to cut the first bar in the letter W. Maxie and Slim followed me. We dragged our feet along like kids making a fox-and-geese pen in the snow.