CHAPTER IX.
THE HOME OF A VANISHED RACE
The meal disposed of, the cow-punchers and the boys, all of whom were pretty well tired out by their exertions of the morning, lounged about a while. Then preparations for the return to the ranch began. A guard was to be left over the cattle, however, as they were still restless and ill at ease, and the boys begged hard to be allowed to form a part of it. At first Mr. Harkness would not hear of it.
"Why, dad, the boys are out here to get experience," protested Harry, "and what better training could they have in ranch life than by standing a night watch over restive cattle?"
"That's all very well," rejoined his father, "but you must remember that I am in a measure responsible for the safety of these young men, and you boys have, up to date, displayed quite a capacity for getting into mischief."
"And getting out of it again," put in the irrepressible Tubby. And the victory was won, as many another victory has been, by a burst of laughter. Soon after, the boys loped to the top of a nearby knoll, and waved good-by to the ranch-bound party. Then they turned their ponies and cantered back to the cow-punchers' huts at a smart pace. Besides the boys, the three Simmons brothers, Frank and Charlie Price and Jeb Cotton were to share the Scouts' watch, Mr. Harkness having promised to 'phone to their various homes explaining their absences. In charge of the four punchers was Blinky, who had also been given orders by Mr. Harkness to keep the boys out of mischief. The cattle, however, grew so restive during the afternoon that the attention of the punchers was fully occupied in "riding them." It seemed to soothe the bovines to have their guardians constantly near them.
"The brutes smell Injuns, just as sure as my name is Blinky Small," declared Blinky emphatically.
The boys, after riding a few rounds with the punchers, began to find this occupation growing monotonous, and looked about for some other means of diversion.
"I know," shouted Tubby suddenly.
"Tubby's got an idea," laughed Merritt.
"Tell him to hold it. He may never get another," jeered Rob.
"Let's play ball," went on the stout youth, absolutely unperturbed by the laughter Rob's comment aroused.
"Fine," came sarcastically from one of the boys. "Where's the bat?"
"Where's the ball?"
"Where are the mitts?"
"Oh, where's the earth?" interrupted Tubby impatiently, stemming the tide of objections. "Say, can't you fellows play ball without a big league collection of stuff?"
"Well, here's a bit of board I can trim down a bit and make a bat of," said Jeb Cotton.
"Good for you, Jeb. You are a young man of resource and ingenuity. You'll make a good scout. How's this for a ball?"
The stout youth held up a rounded bowlder, which must have weighed at least four pounds.
"Oh, rats! Say, what do you want to do – brain us?"
"Couldn't," responded Tubby enigmatically.
"Couldn't what?"
"Brain you."
"Why?"
"Haven't got any."
"Any what?"
"B-r-a-i-n-s, brains!" yelled Tubby, retreating to a safe distance.
"I have it!" exclaimed Rob suddenly.
"What, the pip?"
"No, an idea," responded the boy recklessly, forgetting his own comments on Tubby's inspiration.
"Ho! ho! ho!" howled the stout youth delightedly. "Step up, ladies and gentlemen, and see the eighth – or ninth wonder of the world – Rob Blake has an idea. Step up lively now, before the little creature gets away."
"We can borrow some potatoes from Soapy Sam," said Rob, when some of the laughter at his expense had subsided.
"Borrow them?" exclaimed Bill Simmons. "I guess it will mean giving them. What I couldn't do to a potato with this bat – "
He flourished the piece of lumber Jeb Cotton had shaped, as he spoke. However, Rob's suggestion was tried; but even as Bill Simmons had prophesied, the borrowed potatoes did not prove a success as baseballs. One after another, they were scattered into tiny fragments, and Soapy Sam, on being requisitioned for more, threatened to evict the entire party from his premises.
"Oh, pshaw!" exclaimed Tubby petulantly. "What'll we do?"
"Go swimming," laughed Merritt.
"I have it," exclaimed Rob suddenly.
"He's got it again – a relapse of ideas," grinned Tubby.
"What's the matter with climbing that cliff and exploring those old cave dwellings?"
"Great!" was the unanimous verdict. Privately, one or two of the boys who had heard the ghost legend, were not quite as eager as they seemed to be, to traverse the mysterious passages and tomb-like dwellings of a vanished race, but they didn't say so.
"It's about three hours to sundown. We'll have to shake a leg to get up there and back," said Frank Price.
Acting on this advice, no time was lost in making a start.
"Have we all got revolvers?" asked Rob suddenly.
"Sure," responded Jeb Cotton. "I brought mine when I heard that it was a stampede we were called out on."
The others had done likewise.
"Say," put in Tubby gloomily, as they set out, "what's the good of taking guns with us?"
"Why, you never know what you'll run into in a cave," said Bill Simmons.
"Huh, I never heard of guns being any good against ghosts," chillily remarked the fat youth.
"Well, you're a nice cheerful soul, you are," burst out Rob. "Are you scared?"
"Oh, no; I'm not. Go ahead and rout your ghosts out. Stir 'em up, and make 'em jump through the hoops and back again. Fine!" exploded Tubby.
"Whatever is the matter with him?" asked Merritt, looking about for an answer.
"That idea he had a while back has gone to his head," laughed Harry.
And such was the general opinion.
As has been said, the cliff, at the summit of which were the cave dwellings, lay about half a mile back from the huts of the Far Pasture cow-punchers. The cliff was in itself a remarkable formation. It towered sheer up and down like the wall of a house. It was just as if a giant cheese-knife had shaved a neat slab off the face of the mountain – a slab some four hundred or more feet in height, and a mile or more wide at the base.
From where the boys were, however, they could perceive an old cattle trail winding up the mountainside, off beyond one edge of the smooth cliff. It traced its way among the scrub growth and stunted trees almost – so far as they could judge – to a point near the summit, and afforded an easy way of reaching the top of the cliff.
An hour or more of tough climbing brought them to the top of the mountain – or high hill – which formed a sort of plateau. No time was lost in making for the edge of the cliff, in the face of which, some twenty feet or more from the top, were bored the entrances to the cave-dwellers' mysterious homes.
"Well," said Tubby triumphantly, as he gazed over the dizzy precipice "no cave man's home for us."
It looked as if the stout youth was right. A narrow ledge, forming a sort of pathway against the naked side of the cliff, ran below the cave dwellings as a shelf is seen to extend sometimes below a row of pigeon holes. But from the summit of the cliff to the ledge was, as has been said, all of twenty feet, and there seemed to be no way of bridging the distance.
"Those cave men must have been way ahead of the times," mused Tubby.
"How do you make that out?" inquired Jack Simmons, Bill's younger brother.
"Why, they must have had air ships. They couldn't have rung their front door bells any other way."
"Nonsense they must have had some way of getting down," interposed Rob, who was looking about carefully – "Hooray, fellows! I've got it," he exclaimed suddenly, "look!"
He pushed aside a clump of brush and exposed to view a flight of steps cut in the face of the rock. So filled with dust were they, however, that they had not been visible to any but the sharp eyes of the Boy Scout leader.
"What are you going to do?" asked Merritt, as Rob made for the lip of the cliff.
"Going down there, of course," rejoined Rob.
Merritt, as he gazed over the brink and viewed the sheer drop, down which one false step would have sent its maker plunging like a loosened stone, was about to utter a warning. He checked himself, however, and, with the rest, eagerly watched Rob, as the boy made his way down the precipitous steps, or rather niches, cut in the face of the rock.
It was breath-catching work. The descending boy was compelled to cling to the surface of the cliff like a fly to a window-pane. Between him and the ground, four hundred feet under his shoe soles, nothing interposed but the narrow ledge of rock outside the cliff-dwellers' "front doors."
Rob made the descent in safety, and presently stood in triumph on the ledge. One after another, the Boy Scouts of the Range Patrol followed him, and presently they all stood side by side on the narrow shelf.
"Say, I hope the underpinnings of this don't give way," said Tubby, as he joined them, his round cheeks even ruddier than usual from the exertion of his climb.
"You ought to have been an undertaker, Tubby," exclaimed Merritt. "All you can think of is death and disaster and ghosts."
"Well, if you feel so good about it, you can have the first chance at going into one of those holes," parried Tubby.
"Very well, I will," rejoined Merritt, flushing. He privately did not much relish the idea of being the first to enter those long-untrod passageways. They looked dark and mysterious. An oppressive silence, too, hung about the boys, and half-unconsciously they had dropped their voices to a whisper, as they stood on the threshold of a civilization long passed to ashes.
"Go ahead," said Rob, coming to Merritt's side. Together the two boys, followed by the remainder of the newly recruited Boy Scouts, entered the rocky portal of the first of the dwellings.
A faint, musty smell puffed out in their faces.
"Smells like grandpa's cellar in the country," remarked Tubby, sniffing it.
"Where you used to swipe milk and apples, I suppose," laughed Merritt. Hollow echoes of his merriment went gurgling off down the dark passage, almost as if distant voices had taken them up and were repeating the joke over and over, till it died away in a tiny tinkle of a laugh, like the ghost of a baby's whisper.
"Ugh, I guess I won't laugh again," remarked Merritt.
"Say, Rob, how about a light?" asked Jeb Cotton suddenly.
"I've got a bit of candle here in my pocket," rejoined Rob. "I put it there the other night when Harry was developing some pictures. By the way, I wish you'd brought your camera, Harry."
"So do I. This would make a dandy flashlight in here."
The boys gazed about them admiringly, as Rob struck a match from his waterproof match-safe and lit the candle. They had penetrated fully a hundred feet into the cliff by this time, and the walls about them were marked with curious paintings and carvings, the work of the long-vanished cave-dwellers.
Under their feet was a thick, choking dust, that entered their eyes, ears and noses as they breathed, almost suffocating them. But not one of them was inclined to notice this, when there was so much to take up his attention elsewhere.
"I wonder what the cave-dwellers ate – " began Tubby, when his words were fairly taken out of his mouth by a startling occurrence.
A sudden puff of wind, chill as the breath of a tomb, blew toward them down the tunnel, and at the same instant Rob's candle was blown out. It was all the boys could do to keep from shouting aloud with alarm as they stood plunged into sudden blackness.
The next instant there came an appalling sound, an onrush like the voice of a hundred waterfalls. The wind puffed in their faces in sharp blasts, and something swept by them in the darkness with a strange, muffled shriek.
CHAPTER X.
THE GHOST OF THE CAVE DWELLING
"L-l-let's get out of here – quick!"
Tubby gasped the exclamation, as with a resounding rush the mysterious sounds swept by.
"Ouch, somebody hit me in the face!" howled Jeb Cotton suddenly.
"Me, too!" yelled Bill Simmons.
"Say, fellows," shouted Rob suddenly, as the noise lessened, "be quiet, will you, till I light a candle. I've an idea what that noise was, and it was nothing to get scared at."
"Oh, it wasn't, eh?" protested Tubby angrily. "Well, something hit me a bang on the nose."
"And me on the ear," chimed in Jeb Cotton.
"And me – " Bill Simmons was beginning, when Rob checked him.
"Let up a minute, will you, and give me a chance? All that racket was caused by nothing more than a lot of old bats."
"Cats, you mean, or flying rats," said Tubby scornfully.
"No, bats. Look here. I knocked down one."
Rob held his candle high above his head, and the astonished boys saw lying under a projecting bit of rock one of the leathern-winged cave-dwellers.
"Huh," remarked Tubby, "and I thought it was ghosts. The ghost of the cliff. The one the cow-puncher said he saw."
"I guess that ghost has leather wings and a furry body, if the truth were known," laughed Rob, as he flung the bat he had knocked down into the air, and the creature flapped heavily off toward the cave mouth.
"Yes, ghosts are – " began Merritt, when he broke off suddenly. His mouth opened to its fullest extent, and his eyes grew as round as two big marbles. "Great hookey – what's that?"
His frightened expression was mirrored on the rest of the countenances in the candle-lit circle, as a strange sound was borne to the ears of the Boy Scouts.
"It's footsteps," gasped Jeb Cotton.
"Coming this way, too," stuttered Tubby, edging back.
"Nonsense," said Rob sharply, but nevertheless loosening his revolver in its holster. "It's the wind or something."
"The funniest wind I ever heard," interrupted Tubby scornfully. "It's got feet – hark!"
Nearer and nearer came the mysterious sound. They could now hear it distinctly – a soft "phut-phut" on the dusty floor of the passage.
"Wow-oo, I see two eyes!" yelled Tubby, suddenly taking to his heels. His toe caught on a hidden rock, and he fell headlong in the choking dust.
Scarcely less startled than the fat boy was Rob, as he made out, glaring at them from beyond the friendly circle of light, two big green points of fire.
"Who's there?" he cried sharply.
There was no answer, but the two green globes never moved.
"Speak, or I'll fire!" cried the boy.
"A-choo-oo-o – o-o-o-o-o!"
The tense silence was shattered by a loud sneeze from Tubby, whose nostrils had become filled with the irritating dust. At the same instant an unearthly howl rang through the rocky corridors – a cry so terrible that it set Rob's heart to beating fiercely.
He pulled the trigger more by instinct than anything else, and six spurts of flame leaped from the barrel of his automatic. With a howl more ear-piercing than the first, the points of fire vanished, and there was the sound of a heavy body falling.
"Dead! whatever it is," was Rob's thought, but nevertheless he proceeded cautiously. It was well that he did so, for as he held his candle aloft, the huge, dun-colored body, which lay on the ground directly in front of him, made a convulsive spring. Rob, on the alert as he was, leaped back, and avoided it by a hair's breadth.
"A mountain lion!" cried Harry.
"That's what, and a whumper, too," exclaimed Merritt. "I guess we've laid the ghost all right. In the moonlight a light-colored creature like this would look white against the cliff face."
"I wonder if that last sneeze of mine killed it?" remarked Tubby, who had leisurely sauntered up. There was now no doubt that the great tawny creature was dead. Its final spring must have been a purely convulsive act, for Rob's bullets had pierced its skull in three places.
"Say, fellows," exclaimed Rob suddenly, "the fact that this brute was in here proves a mighty interesting fact."
"And that is, that it's dead."
"Please be quiet for two consecutive minutes, Tubby, if you can do it without injuring yourself. It means that there is another entrance to this place somewhere."
"How do you make that out?" asked Jeb Cotton.
"By applying a little scout lore. There are no tracks at the mouth of the cave, yet this lion is fat and well-fed, so that it must get its food outside somewhere. Therefore, there must be another entrance to the cave."
"Quod erat demonstrandum," quoth Tubby learnedly.
"Which is all the Euclid you know," teased Merritt.
"Well," asked Rob, while Harry Harkness skillfully skinned the lion, "shall we go on or turn back?"
"We'll go on!" shouted everybody.
"If you guarantee no more scares," amended Tubby.
With the tawny pelt slung over Harry's broad shoulder, the little party therefore pressed on into the darkness.
"We'll have to hurry," said Rob suddenly, regarding his candle, of which not much was left.
"How far do you guess it is from the entrance?" questioned Harry.
"I've no idea," was Rob's rejoinder. "I half believe now we were wrong to try to find a way out this way."
He said this in a low voice, so as not to alarm the others, who were behind the leaders. It did indeed begin to look as if the young explorers had placed themselves in a predicament.
Presently, however, the air began to grow fresher, and, uttering a cheer at this sign that they were near to daylight, the lads rushed forward. Still cheering, they emerged into a place where the passage broadened, and in another moment would have been out of the farther end of the tunnel but for an unexpected happening that occurred at that moment.
Rob, who had been slightly in advance, gave the first warning of the new alarm. As the welcome daylight poured upon his face, and he gazed into a sort of cup-like valley beyond the passage mouth, he heard a sudden "z-i-ip!" past his ear, like the whizzing of a locust.
The next instant fragments of rock scattered about his head and he heard a sharp report somewhere outside.
Like a flash, the boy threw himself flat on his stomach and wriggled back into the tunnel.
"They're firing at us!" cried Tubby.
"Yes, but who?" demanded Merritt.
"That's the question," was Rob's rejoinder. "I guess it must be Indians, but then, again, it may be hunters, who, having seen something move, fired. I'm going to try to find out."
"Oh, Rob, be careful," begged Merritt.
"That's all right. Here, Bill, lend me that long pole you've got."
Bill Simmons obediently handed over a long branch he had broken off to use as a guiding staff, before they entered the dark passageway. Rob pulled off his sombrero and stuck it on the pole.
Then he cautiously poked it out of the rocky portal.
"Bang!"
Rob drew in the hat and examined it.
"Phew!" gasped Tubby. "That's a fine way to ventilate a fellow's lid."
A bullet had bored a hole right through the soft gray crown.
"Guess that's Indians, all right," said Harry; "nobody else would be able to shoot like that."
"It is Indians," announced Rob. "I saw one dodge behind some brush when I looked out."
"Well, what are we going to do?" gasped Charley, the younger of the Price brothers, a lad of about fourteen. His face grew long, and he began to whimper.
"Hey, hush up, there," admonished Tubby. "Boy Scouts don't cry when they get in a difficulty; they sit down and try to figure some way out of it."
"And, in this case, that is easy," said Rob.
"Huh?"
"I said it is easy. All we've got to do is to go back again."
"What, without the candle? Make our way through that dark place?"
"Of course. That is, if you don't want to get drilled full of holes by those Indian bullets."
"But supposing they follow us?"
"We'll have to take our chances on that," rejoined Rob.
"Well, you're a cool hand, I must say. You calmly propose that we shall walk back through a dark tunnel, with Heaven knows how many Indians at our heels?"
"It's all we can do, isn't it?"
"Um-m-well, I suppose so. Come on, then, if we've got to do it, the sooner we start the better."
"Wait one minute," said Rob, and, stooping down, he pulled up some dry brush that grew near the cave mouth. He piled this in a heap and set fire to it.
"Whatever are you doing that for?" asked Tubby.
"I know," said Jeb Cotton, "so that the Indians, or whoever it is firing at us, will see it and think we are still there."
Rob nodded approvingly.
"That's it," he said, and plunged off into the blackness of the tunnel. He led the others through it at a rapid pace, but they did not travel so fast that they beat the daylight, however, for when they emerged at the other end it was dark, and the stars were shining above them. Far below they could see little flickering points of fire, where the cow-punchers were keeping watch.
"Wish we were down there," muttered Tubby, as they all emerged on the ledge. "I'm hungry."
"So am I," agreed Rob, "and the quicker we get down the mountain the quicker we'll get some hot supper."
As he spoke, from the mouth of the tunnel, which acted as a sort of gigantic speaking-tube, there came what seemed to be the hollow echo of a shout.
"The Indians!" gasped Rob; "they're after us! Up the steps, everybody, quick!"
A rush for the rough stone steps followed, and so fast did the boys press forward that Rob had to warn them of the danger of speed.
"If you slipped you'd be over the edge," he said.
It was enough. The rush moderated. The thought of slipping off into black space was enough to alarm the stoutest hearts among them.
Tubby was the last up but Rob, who remained behind with drawn revolver. He had nerved himself to fire at the first Indian head that showed out of the tunnel.
"Come on, up with you," Rob urged, as the fat boy placed his foot on the rough flight hewn in the sheer face of the cliff.
"All right, Rob," rejoined the stout youth, scrambling upward. "I'll be up before – "
He broke off short, with a terrible cry that rang out far into the night.
Rob, speechless with horror, saw the stout youth's feet slip from under him, and his hands clutch unavailingly at the smooth face of the cliff.
The next instant – for the whole thing happened in the wink of an instantaneous photographic shutter – Tubby was gone.
With a dreadful sinking of his heart, Rob stretched far over the edge of the ledge, which hung like some flying thing, between heaven and earth. Below him was utter blackness.