CHAPTER XII
THE MAN WHO VANISHED
Bill got up off his knees, glanced this way and that as though looking for something of which he stood in urgent need, and turned a bleak gaze again upon the huddled figure on the ground.
“We better get a fire started,” he said to Abington, unconsciously taking the initiative as if this was his own particular affair and he alone must acquit himself well in the emergency. “I’ll scout around with the light. Maybe I can find a cave—his camp, if it’s down in here. Don’t suppose he’ll jar loose any information—”
Bill continued to stare down at the man, his underjaw thrust out and in his face a certain implacable hardness that brought him a second puzzled glance from Abington.
“Where’s your camp?” Bill demanded abruptly.
The man seemed to draw himself together as if he feared a blow. The murderous eyes flinched away from Bill’s relentless stare. “Find out—if you think—you can!” he snarled.
“Oh, I’ll find it! Don’t you worry a minute,” Bill said viciously. “If necessary, you’ll tell where it is.”
“I won’t tell you. You can go ahead—kill me—be done with it—” The wounded man defied him weakly.
“Who, me?” The savage bitterness of Bill’s laugh was a revelation to Abington. “Me kill you? I should sa-ay not! You mind what I told you two years ago, Jack! That still goes. Don’t think you can die and duck out from under in that way. I’ll nurse you like a sick baby! You’ll get well, see? Well enough to travel, anyway.” He turned abruptly away as if he would not trust himself to say more.
Presently a fire was crackling beside the cliff and Bill had brought water in his hat for Abington’s use in cleansing the wound.
“Fix him up best you can, professor,” said Bill. “Then if you can make out with the fire for light, I’ll borrow the lamp and beat it over to where I cached our stuff. There’s that first-aid kit we saved outa the wreck; I’ll bring it and some grub. It ain’t far. Just over the ridge, half a mile, maybe.”
He drew Abington to one side, out of hearing of the wounded man. “That’s Jack Huntley, professor. He’s got to be put in shape for the trip in to Vegas. It’s a matter of life and death. So do what you can—I know you’re a pretty good doctor when it comes to a pinch. I’ll be right back. Well—hang onto him, professor, till I get back with the stuff. Don’t let him sneak out on you!”
“If he does,” said Abington grimly, “it will be because he sneaks into the next world. I’ll try and not let that happen, Bill, my lad.”
He stood watching the round zone of white light go dancing away and up the hill without any visible means of locomotion, since Bill walked behind it, slipping from rock to rock, pausing and poising here, flitting on again like Peter Pan’s good fairy Tinker Bell. A fantastic comparison in that wild glen where men of past ages had met for their wooing or their warring or to hide from strange beasts that roamed the valley; where even now the air seemed charged with a malignant kind of hate, and with fear that passed all reason—since the man called Jack Huntley had been assured of the best care they could give him.
All the while Abington sat by the fire and waited for Bill, he felt the cold malevolence of the soul behind those staring eyes and the close-shut lips. Though the fancy did not trouble him, it seemed too that the shades of those savage ones of long ago hovered inquisitively in the shadows that fringed the firelight; timid wild folk who dared not walk boldly among these strange men of a later age, yet lingered, curious to see what grim drama was about to be played here where the stage was set with the somber trappings more suited to an old Greek tragedy than of everyday life.
The return of Bill, heavily burdened and with the white light dancing impishly before him, did not spoil the illusion but served instead to deepen it; for the crudely efficient surgery was completed in silence or curt undertones that held a sinister quality of ominous reserve. The white light painted grotesque shadows on the brown-sandstone cliff beside them, gigantic caricatures of men in gruesome pantomime that might have been the enactment of a torture scene, with two fiends performing demoniac rites over some luckless victim.
Bill afterward boiled coffee and mixed a bannock in which he stirred small fragments of cold fried bacon left over from his supper. Abington ate ravenously, and afterward the two smoked beside the fire, Jack Huntley lying wrapped in their two blankets.
As the Great Dipper tilted more and more toward the polestar, fever unlocked the stubborn lips of the wounded man and he muttered endlessly, his sordid secrets betrayed with pitiless repetition. All about millions in carnetite, he babbled, and how “they” would never get it away from him, because he was too smart for them; it was crazy talk, interrupted whenever Abington bent over him ministering to his comfort, doing what he could to allay the fever.
Beside the fire Bill Jonathan brooded, lifting his head to listen when the fellow’s delirium seemed to take a different turn, or some movement roused him from his somber meditations.
Dawn was beginning to work its daily miracle on hills and sky when Bill replenished the fire and turned to Abington, who was sitting with lean fingers clasped around his knees and a cold pipe dangling from between his teeth.
“What do you think of the case, professor? Think he’ll get well, all right?” Bill’s tone made the question seem only the preliminary to what was really in his mind.
Abington yawned. “No reason why he shouldn’t, Bill. I recovered the bullet; it’s a clean wound and no vital organs were injured. He should get well without much trouble—if proper care is used.”
Bill turned away without a word, though it was plain that his mind was full of troubled thoughts. They cooked breakfast and ate in silence. The wounded man had fallen asleep, with the sunlight softly warm on his blanketed shoulder.
Once Bill turned his head and stared long at the man, then looked at Abington, lips parted for speech that after all was withheld. Abington lifted an eyebrow inquiringly and Bill looked away.
“What’s on your mind?” Abington asked finally, setting down his empty cup. “They say confession is good for the soul.”
“Yeah. So’s a few other things. Come on over here on these rocks, professor. That old possum is liable to be listenin’.”
“I don’t think so,” Abington cheerfully disagreed, but he followed Bill to a pile of boulders some distance away, where they could talk without disturbing the patient, or being overheard by him.
“Now, there’s a question I’d like to ask you, professor. Who did you think you was shootin’ at last night, when you ventilated Jack Huntley’s liver?”
Abington’s lips twitched. “At you, Bill.”
“Yeah?” Bill’s jaw stiffened. “Want another try?”
“No, I don’t think so. This man has complicated matters, but he has also cleared up a few things for me.”
“Yeah, and he’ll clear up more—for me,” Bill opined. “If it’s a fair question, I’d like to know where you’ve been since yesterday.”
“Well, not to relate all of my thrilling adventures, I have been wandering around through a series of caves and in the course of time I found myself in a cavern in the top of that peak up there. I judge it to be the one where I saw the reflection of the sun on field glasses. While trying to find my way out of there, I picked up a half-smoked cigarette, of the oval kind which I use.”
“Yeah? One of the flat ones? Kinda backtracked yourself, eh?”
“No-o—for very good reasons I knew that I had never been there before. I thought I had crossed your trail, Bill, my lad.”
“Not mine, professor.” Bill shook his head. “I’ve been huntin’ the hills over by our cave, lookin’ for you. I was workin’ over this way when I heard the shootin’ last night.”
“Yes. Well, a bit later I came across a cache of food taken from our outfit across the valley.”
“The hell you did!” Bill started, and nearly dropped his cigarette. “You sure?”
“Absolutely sure. I ate two cans of our Imperial corned beef—breakfast and dinner. I expected you to show up there, but of course you didn’t. It would make a splendid hideout, Bill. There’s a spring, and cracks in the rock let in sunlight, a perfect retreat. Impossible to come at one from the rear—”
Abington paused and his shoulders moved involuntarily. He was thinking of the Pool of Evil Death. “I’ll show you the place. When I am through in this country you’ll find it useful, no doubt.”
“Not unless Jack Huntley dies. If I can ever get him in somehow to the sheriff, I won’t need to hide out in the hills. Unless,” Bill added dubiously, “they cinch me for that car I run over the cliff.” His eyes clouded. He had forgotten about the destruction of that car.
“I expect they’d hand me about five years for that,” he added gloomily, after a pause. “Where’s the way into that cave of yours?”
“I’d have to lead you to the spot and show you. There’s time enough. I shall want to go back and make a thorough examination of the place for science.”
Bill looked up. “I’ll have to disappoint you about them stone men, professor, I run acrost the cañon yesterday where the hole went into the cave. There’s been a big slide in there. I couldn’t tell within a hundred feet, where the opening used to be. We’d have to tear down the whole mountain to find it.”
Abington said nothing. Creeping into his mind again came suspicion. Had Bill ever known where there was such a cave? Surely that slide had chosen a most convenient time and place for Bill Jonathan!
“I know where it was,” Bill said doggedly, as if he read the thought. “I can show you the slide; you can see it for yourself, professor.”
“My college of science is not collecting slides,” Abington drawled. “Well, I must be getting back to my patient. If he’s awake, he may want to eat something.”
He rose, but Bill had not finished, it seemed. He remained seated on the rock hunched over his cigarette and staring morosely across the little lake.
“So you think I lied to you,” muttered Bill. “You think I’ve been stalling you along! That goes kinda tough, professor. I’ve been dodgin’ around in the hills—yes, sure I have! But I ain’t going to dodge no more and you can go to hell and hunt your own Adamses. You wait till I lead that bird in to the sheriff and make him come clean! It’s him that’ll take a ride to Carson—not me.”
“And the car?” Abington asked softly, his beard hiding a smile.
“Aw, hell!” growled Bill, jerked back to harsh realities.
In his bitterness over the sudden frustration of his hopes, Abington would not speak a word of comfort. Not even the rich storehouse of ancient records in the labyrinth of caves could quite console him at the moment, his heart had been so set on taking back to his college a fossilized man of the Cretaceous period.
He walked moodily over to the makeshift bed of his patient and stared blankly. There was no patient. A shout brought Bill and the two nosed along the cliff like hounds baffled over a warm trail suddenly wiped out with water.
Because the man had been obliged to crawl, it was manifestly impossible for him to get far. Even so, they were a good half hour in running him down and then it was the slight indentations of his knees in a skift of sand behind a bush that gave the clew.
Bill went down on all fours and disappeared. After a minute or two, Abington followed.
It might have been an oversized badger hole, so far as outward appearances went. Even in his haste the trained mind of Abington noted a cunning arrangement of rocks deliberately piled haphazard against the cliff at some time long past, as the twisted roots of old bushes and trees clinging the twining down through the dirt-filled interstices gave mute testimony.
Yet the rock pile was in reality a solid, arched covering for the sloped entrance to another cave, in the mouth of which Jack Huntley lay sweating with the pain of his wound, as frenziedly malevolent as a rattler pinned under a rock.
Kneeling facing each other with the wounded man gasping curses between them, Abington and Bill Jonathan locked glances; Abington’s eyes coldly searching; Bill’s defiant, hurt and trying to cover a certain wistfulness he would have denied with much profanity.
“He’s got to clear me with the law!” Bill said between clenched jaws. “He’s the only man on earth that can do it. He pulled the robbery they laid onto me and if he don’t come clean I’ll kill him inch by inch!”
Jack Huntley turned his head and sent a glance to Bill’s face; shifted his eyes to Abington’s, that were black as ebony and quite as hard; turned again to Bill and met a cold stare that shriveled his courage to whining cowardice.
“Don’t you, Bill! I—I’m done for! You can’t hurt a dying man! You wouldn’t have the heart!”
“Oh, wouldn’t I?” Bill’s laugh was in itself a threat. “Say! I got about as much heart as them stone men we’re after. You wait and see how much heart I’ve got for you—you hound!”
“It’s murder!” Jack Huntley’s voice rose to a shriek. “You wouldn’t stand by and see him kill a man that—that’s all shot up—” His eyes turned glassily to Abington.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Never had Abington’s voice been more casually brutal. “You’re going to die anyway, you know.”
“Yeah, and you won’t die so darned peaceful, either,” Bill added darkly.
“Of course you can save yourself a good deal of suffering,” Abington pointed out in his calm professional tone, “by writing a full confession. In that case I should feel obliged to protect you from Bill’s vengeful nature.”
“It’s worse than Injuns!” Huntley cried, his fear rising to panic.
“Not if you write the truth,” Abington pointed out, taking from an inner pocket a water-warped notebook. “Here’s a fountain pen which may contain enough ink, unless you wax overeloquent. Write the truth, Huntley. I’ll take care of Bill.”
“You’ll have a hell of a time, professor, if he don’t clean his dirty soul right down to the bottom!”
“I’ll have to be raised up,” whined the sick man, darting furtive glances here and there as if, even yet, he hoped by some miracle to escape.
“For legal purposes,” Abington directed, holding Huntley up and giving Bill a quelling look, “begin like this: ‘I, Jack Huntley, of sound mind—and of my own free will—do hereby confess—that on the—’”
It was Bill himself who named the date, snapping the words out with a savage click of the teeth.