by Don Wilcox
As he sailed near our hiding place I got a clear view of his piggish, brutal face. His large teeth jutted forward, his eyes showed white with a fishlike bulge. His heavy locks of hair were a dirty black. His gluttonous jowls and the evil forward thrust of his head reminded you that he was more than a killer, he was a devourer of human beings.
My flesh was still creeping from the sight of him many minutes after he narrowly missed seeing us. He circled back.
Meanwhile another of the pursuing wingmen fell victim to the ancient warrior’s bloody sword. And that, I’m glad to say, put an end to their following him. At least for the time being he was safe. They picked up their own dead and wounded and flew back to the celebration. I wondered how Thunder Splitter would explain this fiasco to his feast mob. A pretty sorry mess as a by-product to his celebrating!
It was some comfort, at least, to know that the newly arrived Greek could take care of himself. When the gang back at camp should hear of him, I reflected, there would be lots of excitement. There might be a boom in iron and steel, too, if these rugged peaks would yield any metals. The effectiveness of a ready blade against a pair of wings had made history today.
But before the day was over I was to see no more of the Greek, but a great deal more of the number one feaster. Perhaps I had been too hasty in judging the mighty Thunder Splitter as an adversary who lacked nerve.
“He got his eyeful of that Greek with the sword,” I said to Wells, as we watched the feast from a distance. “Now he’s getting his stomach full of the other one. Do you reckon that’ll hold him for the day? Or will he remember us?”
Wells talked it over with Orchid Wings and Rattle Whiskers. It was interesting to hear them speak in their limited English vocabulary, always in brief, crisp sentences.
“We are marked,” old Rattle Whiskers boomed.
“He will follow us,” said Orchid Wings. She cast her dark eyes over the wide sun-baked landscape. “He will see signs.”
“You mean,” said Wells, “that he and the tribe will go after us in earnest?”
“After me,” said Orchid Wings. “I have fought the feast before. Thunder Splitter knows. When I speak against the feast, he frowns. He snarls. Now he is ready to bite.”
“She is right,” Rattle Whiskers said, and his comical old face was deeply seridus. “Today we have been seen. Today he knows. We have tried to spoil his feast.”
Wells nodded gravely. “They know we’re all in league on this deal. If McCorkle and I hadn’t been on the ground they might have got both of those vonzels. But that sword play threw them for a loss. They’ll exact a price for that—and any of us will be fair game.” Then Wells turned his eyes on me. He must have guessed that I felt like a sap to let myself in for all this. He might be in league with Orchid Wings and her little group of Green Tooth rebels. But was that any reason for me to blunder into the same trap and buy myself a death warrant?
“Sorry, McCorkle,” Wells said. “Don’t mention it.” I tossed it off with a wave of the hand. “You’re not the only one that feels for historical mavericks who stumble into, this fireless barbecue.”
Evidently Orchid Wings and Rattle Whiskers didn’t get me. They turned their question-mark faces to Wells.
“He means,” said Wells, “that he is with us. He is against the feast.”
We winged away over the east range. The novelty of riding in these underslung air rickshaws tickled my funny bone. Way down yonder were our shadows slipping over the crags and up the slopes as smooth as a mechanical toy.
We were floating along at a comparatively slow pace, though it might have seemed swift enough to the ones who were doing the work. Above the constant whiz of brushing through the air you could hear the bits of conversation.
Would the wingmen come out to the Green Tooth and attack in force? they wondered. Should Orchid and her old aunt, her three husky cousins, and the rest of the family leave this part of the desert and take themselves to some lonelier part of the world?
Could they go far enough to be safe from pursuit, yet not so far as to be in danger of jailing out of the world?
Wells and I exchanged significant glances at this strange idea. Could one fall out of this world, just as he had fallen into it?
I hung there in the talons of Rattle Whiskers, skimming along over green and pink and golden cone-shaped mountains, the cool winds of the upper altitudes blowing against my face. I laughed to myself. Yes, a man could fall out of this world without much trouble. If this wingman should let me drop, it would happen—but quick. I don’t know whether I’d find my way into a better world or a worse one, but I’d sure as hell cancel this one off in a hurry.
My laughter gave out suddenly. The flapping of wings took on a new tempo, and for good reason. We were being pursued.
A sizeable squadron of wingmen—perhaps two dozen of them—were following through the skies in our wake.
They were still a long distance away, but gaining fast. And they had no burdens to impede them.
We swooped toward the earth to take advantage of the concealment that the passing peaks would offer. Old Rattle Whiskers turned to get a good view of the pursuers. I craned my neck, caught the cold light in his keen eyes.
“Feast is over,” he reported in a weighty voice. “They are coming for us.”
“Is Thunder Splitter among them?” Orchid Wings asked.
“He leads them,” said Rattle Whiskers. “He will be a mad one.”
“He’ll be satisfied with nothing less than our bare bones,” said Wells.
“I think,” said Rattle Whiskers, “that you are right.”
CHAPTER XIX
The German’s Seismograph
If you’ve seen movies in which there’s a hair’s breadth race for the blockhouse before the Indians closed in, or a run for the bomb shelter before the big ones started popping, you’ve got a dim idea of what we went through.
The afternoon shadows helped. Orchid Wings and her bewhiskered godfather knew how to make the most of shadows. Wells and I asked to be dropped so the four of us could scatter and take our own chances. But our winged carriers clung to us. Before nightfall, after the most breath-taking afternoon Of hide-and-seek in the history of any McCorkle, I found myself at length climbing down through the dark passages of a cinnamon roll tunnel. My three companions seemed to know where they were going. I was only too glad to follow.
We were safe, now. Safe in the same degree that an escaped criminal is safe. Safe as long as we chose to keep in hiding—as long as we lurked in tunnels where no large search parties could pounce upon us in full strength. These wingmen, naturally enough, preferred to do their fighting out in the open, not in the narrow passages of tunnels where their wings became a handicap.
Within the next two days we found that we were in the presence of company. The German professor was living here, carrying on his studies in a rocky chamber with a narrow horizontal opening to the Outside world.
The outside world was alive with more company, whether we liked it or not. This steep rocky mountainside must have been the wingmen’s haunt that the gang had looked out upon during our first week. In several cavernous rooms we found these long horizontal “windows” of space—cracks beneath a ledge, varying from two or three inches to a full foot in depth.
Of course no creature with wings would attempt to crawl through such a narrow space. A man might—but Wells and I didn’t. We were quite content to sit inside, breathe the fresh air that filtered in, and eavesdrop on the passing show in silence.
“This is where Franz Cobert and the gang got onto the wingman’s language,” Wells mentioned.
By this time, of course, I had already learned a number of the key words. But now my vocabulary expanded by leaps and bounds, and I spent hours at the rocky window gathering the news.
Every night that week the wingmen’ held a huge mass meeting. Old Thunder Splitter was the chief orator. There were others who could stir your blood, too, by the very weight of their voices. But he was
the one who made them jump up and down and clack their talons on the stones in a demonstration of excitement.
He was orating about the colors in the sky and the mountains. Everywhere he looked he read signs of trouble.
The fact was, there had been a few rather startling landslides in recent days. The effect was such as to frighten superstitious people. For the whole side of a mountain could change its color if the avalanche happened to carry away an outer layer of the cinnamon-roll formation.
Interpreted, Thunder Splitter was saying, “You must be warned, my men and women, that great destruction is hovering over us. The lands may rock with the terrors of Flash Death.”
It was hard to tell whether he himself believed Flash Death to be an actual god, or simply a geological process. At any rate he made believe he was on speaking terms with it—and that was where Orchid Wings’ danger was growing hourly.
In his orations to the public Thunder Splitter didn’t start in naming names. He would say, “Somewhere there is one of us who has defied the gods of our tribe. The mountains have begun to tremble. Somewhere among us—or among the private nests far and wide around us—someone can be adjudged guilty.”
His gestures would take in the whole wide desert, but his eyes, sweeping the distant peaks, would always come to rest looking across the flat in the direction of the Green Tooth.
After such orations the crowd would carry on with excited jabber for half the night. After most of them had finally flown home you could still hear the low voices of a few small groups, gossiping on until the dawn.
“She’s a disgrace to the tribe,” some would say. “She has criticized Thunder Splitter after every feast.”
“Where did she get those notions that vonzels should be respected?”
“She not only respects them—she falls in love with them.”
“How do you know that?”
“She has been taking one of them all around the desert on her wings.”
“That does not prove she loves him. Perhaps he has made a slave of her.”
“What power could any awkward wingless creature have? These vonzels are accursed of the gods. Look at them. They are weighed down with heavy legs. Even if they could grow wings they could never fly until they got rid of their legs.”
“Perhaps with his pretty words he has made a slave of her.”
“She should have made a feast of him. And a feast he would have been, indeed, if Orchid Wings had not protected him—him and his vonzel friends—with scores of her clever little schemes.”
Some of those who participated in this gossip were a bit more charitable toward Orchid Wings. There were a few who even dared to whisper unkind words about Thunder Splitter.
“How should he know that the Flash Death is hovering over us preparing to strike? Do you know what I think? He is a glutton for the flesh of the vonzels.”
“But he eats them as a ceremony.”
“He pretends to. He pretends that it soothes the anger of the Flash Death for him and his friends to eat the flesh of vonzels. But how can this be so?
Does the blood stream of his body mix with the blood stream of the gods?”
“You are talking like Orchid Wings,” the fearful listeners would object. “Orchid Wings received her dangerous ideas from her godfather, who had the misfortune to fall into another world far away. Be careful what you say, or you too will help bring on the Flash Death.”
It was a burning problem with many of them to know what to believe. If they dared to grow skeptical of Thunder Splitter’s nearness to the gods, they were reminded that he could and usually did predict with accuracy the coming of new vonzels to this land.
So Thunder Splitter grew in strength. And those who wanted to befriend Orchid Wings would scout over the mountains trying to find her and warn her.
“If she isn’t guilty,” others would say, “why doesn’t she join us in these councils? Why doesn’t she appear to defend herself?”
It looked bad for her, all right. I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into a dilemma.
When I thought of the gang and how we all resented having Wells taken away from us I wanted to hate her.
When I listened to this tribal gossip and saw that they were all in turmoil because she was flying in the face of their traditions, such as human feasts, it seemed again as if she ought to be hated.
But the truth was, I was beginning to like her, and respect her—yes, and depend upon her. It was through her that I now had old Rattle Whiskers as a friend, ready to taxi me around, when the nights were dark enough for me to venture out.
Then, too, it was plain that Wells was a thousand per cent for her. He seemed darned pleased with himself to be her confidential friend. And there was no doubt that she was helping him with some of the answers to this dizzy puzzle, the desert of the damned.
“As soon as we have time, Corky,” Wells would say, “I’ll give you a couple earfuls of my theory about this place. But the main thing now is to keep on the job. Between the tribe’s talk and the German Professor’s experiments we’re gaining ground.”
Our means of spying on the German was pretty crude and cheap, but it was getting results.
After our first run-in with him, Wells was afraid he’d pick up and leave these cinnamon roll tunnels rather than chance another encounter. He was one scared German, believe me. After that hard siege of imprisonment a few months before, he thought we’d kill him this time.
Killing him was the last thing we wanted to do. We wanted him to go right on with his studies, and the more he mumbled aloud, the better it suited us.
Well, for three or four days he slipped around through the black caverns as cautiously as a panther, and hid where he thought he’d see us pass between him and some burning torches he’d placed to trap us.
But we outguessed him and didn’t show ourselves. At last he took for granted we were gone, and went on with his work.
The daring thing we did, that gave us the best view into his cavern laboratory, was to view it from the outside of the mountain.
Yes, it was devilishly risky. But we used a bagful of tricks and got away with it for nearly two weeks. Orchid Wings helped us with the original plan, which was to creep outside at night with our faces blacked with mud, and hide ourselves in the bushes with our blacked faces right up to the crevice beneath the ledge. In other words, we became camouflaged statues at the outer corners of the professor’s long horizontal window. When the daylight poured in we could see him at work. The light was on him. Our faces were in the dark. As long as we could lie there without sneezing or falling asleep and snoring we could watch his every move.
An ingenious guy, that German professor. He had somehow dragged in three long posts of stone which he could build into a tripod. Then, with a lot of stout homemade rope woven of yellow grass, he suspended a fairly round boulder.
“It’s a regular seismograph,” Wells told me. “That pointer you saw him working on today is supposed to make little jiggley marks if there’s ever any disturbance in these mountains. He’s been having trouble getting the weight to hang free and yet have the point register a clean line.”
“Disturbance?” I said. “In my opinion there’s already been a hellova lot of disturbance in these mountains.”
“He’s testing for geological disturbances—such as earthquakes. The way he keeps studying the marks, and the way he keeps mumbling about gravitational forces, he seems to think something’s coming.”
Our daylight hours of spying would have been terribly uncomfortable if we had had to wait there in the bushes until darkness. As it was, the old sun would burn down mercilessly before we could get away safely. But, fortunately, the German had a habit of falling asleep in the middle of the forenoon. As soon as he would sink into his thunderous snores we would simply roll in through the horizontal opening, stop for a moment’s inspection of the seismograph chart, and patter down the tunnels for home.
CHAPTER XX
Geological Shakedown
The first bounce of rocks somewhere across the sandy flat echoed across to my hiding place with a mild little thump.
I was lying there in the bushes with my face wedged in the narrow crevice. Suddenly this funny little tremor jolted my body. The faint smack against my bare toes might have been a couple kicks from Tom Thumb. A thimbleful of sand jumped into my right ear.
The professor was bending over the chart beneath his suspended weight at the moment. He almost leaped over the tripod.
“It’s coming! It’s coming!” he yelled. He ran up to the wall a few feet from my blackened face and peered out at the distant line of mountains.
“Landslide!” he yelped. “Dot’s it! Dot’s it!” And he went into a lot of guttural exclamations all for his own benefit.
Another thump of shaking earth struck through my body. I suddenly forgot I was supposed to be hiding. I rolled over and looked.
Far to the west, through the haze of forenoon sunshine, I could see a cloud of dust rising from the base of a tall, jagged peak. The sight startled me, more so because that peak normally appeared pink in the morning light. Now a long vertical slice of blue showed.
And widened before my eyes! Another sensation of quaking. Another boiling cloud of dust from the base of that peak.
In that exciting moment I must have felt some of the same thrill as the German, who had awaited this moment. I forgot my manners and joined him in shouting.
“Greatgranddaddy McCorkle, it’s a sure-nuff earthquake.”
My outburst came nearer to knocking the German off his pegs than the jolt underfoot. He jumped back, stumbled over the tripod, and came down with a splash on his clay water jug.
I rolled into his private laboratory, bounced to my feet, and scampered down the black tunnel calling for Wells.
A half hour later the shocks began in earnest. I hadn’t found Wells. Nor had I seen anything of Orchid Wings. They had not returned from a night’s errand to the west range—an errand which I had guessed to be a visit to the goddess of white flames.