THE TRAITOR’S FLIGHT.
“Pale-faces stay here till Harry see if path clear. Jack’s spies may be near.”
The speaker was the individual known as New York Harry, who had surrendered to the troops on the morning of Kit South’s return to camp, and he addressed the three men whom he had led to the lava-beds, for the purpose, as he averred, to surprise a small detachment of Modocs.
“Now look here,” said Sam Thatcher, one of the trio, who had been warned by keen Kit South. “You’re not going alone. I’m going to crawl for’ard with you, and by hokey! if I see a suspicious move on your part, I’ll send a ray of starlight through your head.”
The Indian did not reply, and submitted to the border-man’s company, with ill-humor plainly visible in his dark eyes.
“Now, stay hyar, boys, an’ keep eyes an’ ears open,” said Thatcher, and as the guide, impatient to be off, moved slowly on, he added. “This chap’s up to something—something devilish; I feel it away down in my boots.”
Then the twain pushed forward together, and soon disappeared.
Ever and anon Harry would pause and listen intently, but not a sound reached his ears. The stillness of the tomb brooded over the fortresses of the renowned Modocs, and the stars shed a strange light upon the death-traps of lava.
Sam Thatcher kept his eyes fastened upon his guide. He knew that Kit South never suspicioned any one without cause, and when he told him to watch Harry, he knew that treachery was in the air.
Suddenly the Modoc paused and turned his head.
“Hunter!” he whispered, and with cocked revolver, Thatcher moved to his side.
“Well—heavens!”
The exclamation was not spoken in a loud voice; the hand of the Indian prevented this, for it suddenly closed over the Californian’s mouth, and he fell to the earth with the words dying on his lips.
New York Harry held a bloody knife in his hand, and Sam Thatcher, the scout of five-and-twenty years, lay dead at his feet!
Quickly the scalp was jerked from the dead man’s head, and with an ejaculation of triumph, the murderer turned toward the remaining border-men.
He gained an elevated spot and looked down upon the couple, waiting, ignorant of Thatcher’s doom, for his return.
For a moment the Modoc contemplated them, then deliberately cocked a large navy revolver, and rested it on a shining rock.
No compunctions of conscience arrested the murderous design; the trigger was drawn, and one of the hunters dropped like a stricken bullock, without a cry or groan.
The last one, Luke Davis, looked up and caught a glimpse of the shining pistol-barrel. Instantly he raised his carbine, but the Indian sent another ball from the rock, and the hunter dropped on his knees, then prone upon the ground—dead.
The scalping operation, as in Sam Thatcher’s case, followed the consummation of treachery, and loaded with the arms of the murdered men, New York Harry disappeared among the gray rocks.
Kit South’s warning had availed them naught; the hand of the traitor was too swift for Thatcher’s eye. Had the Lava-Bed ranger stood in his shoes, the result might have been an entirely different one.
The Indian soon disappeared below the surface of the lava formations, and found himself in a high-ceiled corridor, whose sides he could touch with his hands. He seemed familiar with its dubious windings, for he pushed forward with alacrity, and surprised a score of Modocs in a large cave, almost two miles from the spot where he had entered the honeycomb.
“Mouseh missed Harry,” said the Modoc chief, greeting the Indian. “Where he been?”
“To the camp of the blue-coats,” was the reply, in the Klamath tongue, for New York Harry had spent many years among the Klamaths, and therefore had acquired their language almost to the entire exclusion of his own. “General going to send troops after Mouseh to-morrow. He give Harry guns and pistols—see!”
He thrust the weapons forward, and in the action exposed the trio of scalps that hung at his belt—a black, a brown and a sandy scalp.
“Where get these?” and a number of savages sprung forward with cries of delight, as their chief put the interrogative.
“From their owners!” was the reply, and the story of his treachery fell from the Indian’s lips.
The red rebels listened to it, highly pleased, and at the conclusion clapped their approval.
“Where white Indian?” asked Harry, sweeping the crowd with the keenest of sloe-black eyes.
“Dead!” said Jack, laconically.
“Dead?” echoed New York Harry.
“Dead and in the black river. Jack glad he’s gone. Good spy, good scout; but a very dog!”
“Then where girl?” questioned the traitor.
“Oh, she in cave. Kit and Cohoon get away from Mouseh; but Artena still in his fingers.”
“Good. The red girl is an accursed snake, and she should die.”
“She shall die!”
“Harry go now, if Mouseh has nothing for him to do,” said the spy, after a long silence, during which Jack had been busy with his thoughts.
The Modoc raised his head.
“Harry done well,” and here the chief’s eye fell upon the scalps. “He be Mouseh’s spy now in place of the white Indian.”
“Mouseh,” and the speaker stepped nearer the chief rebel, “Harry take three scalps to-night—the scalps of three brave men. Now, he asks a favor of you.”
“Speak,” said Jack. “Harry is brave; he done much to-night.”
“He wants the pale girl now. Long ago he saw her in her lodge on Lost River, and loved her pretty face.”
“If Mouseh gives pale flower to Harry, he will not leave the caves?”
“Not while a Modoc lives to fight the blue-coats!”
“The pale girl is Harry’s. What will he do with her?”
“Take her to the little cave which Mouseh knows is Harry’s.”
“It is well. But when the day comes, meet us here. As you say, the blue-coats will come to-morrow, and we must meet them.”
“I will be here,” said the spy. “When New York Harry turns on Mouseh, may the Great Spirit strike him with His bolts of fire.”
Then the Indian turned and glided from the cave as noiselessly as he had entered.
He hurried away as though some important errand demanded immediate attention, and a few minutes later he confronted the three guards who stood before the cavern that contained Artena and our whiter heroine.
A brief conversation with the guards enabled him to step into the lighted place, and he confronted the captives with an exclamatory salutation.
During the day just passed the imprisoned twain had slept but little, although nature needed repose. The phantom of doom that hovered over their heads served to keep their eyes painfully open, and their thoughts were not of an enviable nature. Their guards had been as reticent as statues concerning the designs of Mouseh against their persons, but the women felt that at any moment the messenger of death might arrive from the chief, and they would greet him with open eyes—with every sense alive, keenly so.
’Reesa sprung to her feet when New York Harry’s exclamation fell upon their ears; but Artena remained on the couch and looked searchingly up into his eyes.
“So,” said ’Reesa, “Jack has sent for us at last.”
“No. Harry not take captives to Mouseh,” was the quick reply, and there was an air of self-triumph in his mien. “The cave prisoners are to be separated.”
“No! no!” and ’Reesa sprung to Artena. “Do not tear us apart.”
“The white girl is unfit to mate with the red traitress,” said Harry, stepping forward and grasping ’Reesa’s arm. “Jack give you to New York Harry, and you go with him now. White Indian dead, you see.”
“Yes, and I thank Heaven for it,” cried the scout’s daughter. “Artena, he shall not—”
Before she could finish her sentence the Indian jerked her from the Squaw Spy, and started back.
“Give her back to me!”
The cry sprung from Artena’s lips, and with the agility of the jungle-tiger, she leaped from the couch, knife in hand.
But planting his feet firmly on the ground, the Indian met the charge, and dexterously knocked the knife aside as it descended.
Then, before Artena could recover, he clutched her throat, and hurled her with all his might back upon the couch.
“Is this the way you watch your captives?” he demanded, turning to the guards who had watched the brief combat with bated breath, and ready weapons. “Here, take the knife, and see that the scarlet tigress has no more arms secreted upon her person. Mouseh shall hear of this if you don’t watch his captive closer.”
With the last word he glanced at Artena, lying motionless on the skins, then strode past the abashed sentries, and turned into the first corridor that greeted his left hand.
“White girl’s Harry’s captive,” he said in a low tone, addressing the burden that lay across his arm. “What does she say now? Surely she recollects the Indians who used to lay flowers on her door-sill on Lost River. Has the girl forgotten New York Harry? New York Harry—ha! ha! ha!”
But ’Reesa South made no reply, and after an observation in the dark, the Indian uttered an exclamation.
His captive was asleep.
Had her ears been on the alert she might have recognized the voice in the laugh that rung through the gloom.
“This is the fifth passage,” said Harry, suddenly pausing before what his band told him was the mouth of a subterranean corridor. “I missed Doctor Frank among the chiefs, and may be that the fool has played me false. I’ll see while I’m here, for I’m never coming back to this spot again. Wonder what Jack would say to hear that! But,” as he deposited his captive on the floor and ignited several lucifer matches by striking them against the wall, “I’ve had enough of this war, and when an Indian can save his neck, he’s a fool if he doesn’t.”
For a moment the matches burned blue, and then began to reveal the interior of the cave.
Slowly a dark object on the floor grew into shape, and the Indian started back when he recognized it.
It was the figure of an Indian, and the necklace of claws and snake’s teeth that encircled the swollen and putrid neck, proclaimed him a medicine-man.
“That’s enough,” said Harry, turning from the bloated carcass to his prize. “Some strong medicine has killed even a doctor,” and with this he left the cave.
He depended in a great measure on the guidance of his band, for eyes could not avail aught in the cimmerian gloom and at last he paused beside a narrow torrent that pushed its way over many a rugged rock.
Overhead the stars shone with all the beautiful luster of planets, and a fresh, cool night-breeze fanned the faces of the twain.
“I must cross this infernal river,” murmured the Indian, suddenly turning his face up-stream. “And only a short distance up here I can cross on a natural bridge made for devils—for the spirits of the Modoc’s evil band.”
He took two steps forward when he suddenly halted, and grew into a statue on the shore.
One hand covered ’Reesa’s lips, the other the hilt of a knife.
Something had dropped into the water from above—a lava pebble; but who had loosened it?
He cast his eyes up at the stars, but they had been blotted out of existence, at least to his orbs of vision.
Somebody was squeezing his person through the hole in the basaltic ceiling!
There was no doubt of this.
Suddenly New York Harry started forward, knife in hand.
But he paused a second later, for a man had dropped upon the shore—a man whom he could almost touch with his outstretched arm. And the aperture was darkened again.
“All right,” whispered the man, in a cautious tone. “The coast is clear.”
The Indian started, and hugged the black wall with his beautiful captive. He dared not retreat, for the loose pebbles would betray him.
Then he saw two other figures join the first, and after a short council all glided away—down the river.
New York Harry drew a breath of relief, and resumed his journey once more.
“If I wasn’t going away for good to-night,” he murmured, “I’d spoil the plans of them three pale faced dogs. Perhaps Mouseh will discover before day that Donald McKay is not dead—that he still tramps the lava-beds, and that with Kit South and this pale girl’s dog of a lover. Let them go. New York Harry is done mixing in their affairs; he wouldn’t turn back now to save the whole Modoc nation!”
The next moment he reached the foot of a strange bridge, that spanned the stream with a single arch.
To the person acquainted with the wondrous interior of the lava-beds, the mention of this bridge will occasion no surprise. The great convulsion of nature that cast the locale of our story into such a horrid mold, fashioned the bridge, as the Modocs believe, for the passage of evil spirits across the stream, and therefore no Indian had the hardihood to approach the spot.
But “desperate diseases need desperate remedies.” None but a giant could stem the torrent and gain the opposite bank by swimming, and the bridge was the only avenue of escape that presented itself to the traitor.
He secured a new hold on the girl, and griped the blade of the knife with his teeth, as he climbed upon the structure and advanced.
It took the cunning of his right hand to steady him.
All at once he stopped and crouched to the stones, with a heart suddenly stilled by terror.
A living object was on the bridge before him, but whether man or beast he could not tell.
It was a moment of indescribable suspense.
The traitor, without knowing the nature of his foe, would not advance.
But he must cross the river; freedom, safety, lay beyond the further bank.
At last he started forward again.
No noise.
Perhaps, after all, his senses had deceived him.
A step further.
Ah! there was an enemy on the bridge, for the traitor felt a hand close on his throat.
It was the hand of an Indian!
New York Harry started up, dropping ’Reesa on the bridge as he did so, and tried to cope with his still unseen antagonist!