The Max Brand Megapack (209 page)

Accordingly Jerry raised his little pocket electric torch and held it above his head. They saw a tunnel opening, with raw dirt walls and floor and a rude framing of heavy timbers to support the roof. But it turned an angle and went out of view in a very few paces.

“Go down there with your lantern and look for the exit,” said Ronicky Doone. “I’ll stay back here and see that we get our farewell all fixed up.”

The damp cellar air seemed to affect the throat of the fat man. He coughed heavily.

“Say, Ronicky,” said Jerry Smith, “looks to me that you’re carrying this pretty far. Let’s take a chance on what we’ve got ahead of us?”

The fat man was chuckling: “You show a touching trust in me, Mr. Doone.”

Ronicky turned on him with an ugly sneer. “I don’t like you, Fernand,” he said. “They’s nothing about you that looks good to me. If I knew half as much as I guess about you I’d blow your head off, and go on without ever thinking about you again. But I don’t know. Here you’ve got me up against it. We’re going to go down that tunnel; but, if it’s blind, Fernand, and you trap us from this end, it will be the worst day of your life.”

“Take this passage, Doone, or turn around and come back with me, and I’ll show some other ways of getting out—ways that lie under the open sky, Doone. Would you like that better? Do you want starlight and John Mark—or a little stretch of darkness, all by yourself?” asked Fernand.

Ronicky Doone studied the face of Fernand, almost wistfully. The more he knew about the fellow the more thoroughly convinced he was that Fernand was bad in all possible ways. He might be telling the truth now, however—again he might be simply tempting him on to a danger. There was only one way to decide. Ronicky, a gambler himself, mentally flipped a coin and nodded to Jerry.

“We’ll go in,” he said, “but man, man, how my old scars are pricking!”

They walked into the moldy, damp air of the tunnel, reached the corner, and there the passage turned and ended in a blank wall of raw dirt, with a little apron of fallen debris at the bottom of it. Ronicky Doone walked first, and, when he saw the passage obstructed in this manner, he whirled like a flash and fired at the mouth of the tunnel.

A snarl and a curse told him that he had at least come close to his target, but he was too late. A great door was sliding rapidly across the width of the tunnel, and, before he could fire a second time, the tunnel was closed.

Jerry Smith went temporarily mad. He ran at the door, which had just closed, and struck the whole weight of his body against it. There was not so much as a quiver. The face of it was smooth steel, and there was probably a dense thickness of stonework on the other side, to match the cellar walls of the house.

“It was my fool fault,” exclaimed Jerry, turning to his friend. “My fault, Ronicky! Oh, what a fool I am!”

“I should have known by the feel of the scars,” said Ronicky. “Put out that flash light, Jerry. We may need that after a while, and the batteries won’t last forever.”

He sat down, as he spoke, cross-legged, and the last thing Jerry saw, as he snapped out the light, was the lean, intense face and the blazing eyes of Ronicky Doone. Decidedly this was not a fellow to trifle with. If he trembled for himself and Ronicky, he could also spare a shudder for what would happen to Frederic Fernand, if Ronicky got away. In the meantime the light was out, and the darkness sat heavily beside and about them, with that faint succession of inaudible breathing sounds which are sensed rather than actually heard.

“Is there anything that we can do?” asked Jerry suddenly. “It’s all right to sit down and argue and worry, but isn’t it foolish, Ronicky?”

“How come?”

“I mean it in this way. Sometimes when you can’t solve a problem it’s very easy to prove that it can’t be solved by anyone. That’s what I can prove now, but why waste time?”

“Have we got anything special to do with our time?” asked Ronicky dryly.

“Well, my proof is easy. Here we are in hard-pan dirt, without any sort of a tool for digging. So we sure can’t tunnel out from the sides, can we?”

“Looks most like we can’t,” said Ronicky sadly.

“And the only ways that are left are the ends.”

“That’s right.”

“But one end is the unfinished part of the tunnel; and, if you think we can do anything to the steel door—”

“Hush up,” said Ronicky. “Besides, there ain’t any use in you talking in a whisper, either. No, it sure don’t look like we could do much to that door. Besides, even if we could, I don’t think I’d go. I’d rather take a chance against starvation than another trip to fat Fernand’s place. If I ever enter it again, son, you lay to it that he’ll get me bumped off, mighty pronto.”

Jerry Smith, after a groan, returned to his argument. “But that ties us up, Ronicky. The door won’t work, and it’s worse than solid rock. And we can’t tunnel out the side, without so much as a pin to help us dig, can we? I think that just about settles things. Ronicky, we can’t get out.”

“Suppose we had some dynamite,” said Ronicky cheerily.

“Sure, but we haven’t.”

“Suppose we find some?”

Jerry Smith groaned. “Are you trying to make a joke out of this? Besides, could we send off a blast of dynamite in a closed tunnel like this?”

“We could try,” said Ronicky. “Way I’m figuring is to show you it’s bad medicine to sit down and figure out how you’re beat. Even if you owe a pile of money they’s some satisfaction in sitting back and adding up the figures so that you come out about a million dollars on top—in your dreams. Before we can get out of here we got to begin to feel powerful sure.”

“But you take it straight, friend: Fernand ain’t going to leave us in here. Nope, he’s going to find a way to get us out. That’s easy to figure out. But the way he’ll get us out will be as dead ones, and then he can dump us, when he feels like it, in the river. Ain’t that the simplest way of working it out?”

The teeth of Jerry Smith came together with a snap. “Then the thing for us to do is to get set and wait for them to make an attack?”

“No use waiting. When they attack it’ll be in a way that’ll give us no chance.”

“Then you figure the same as me—we’re lost?”

“Unless we can get out before they make the attack. In other words, Jerry, there may be something behind the dirt wall at the end of the tunnel.”

“Nonsense, Ronicky.”

“There’s got to be,” said Ronicky very soberly, “because, if there ain’t, you and me are dead ones, Jerry. Come along and help me look, anyway.”

Jerry rose obediently and flashed on his precious pocket torch, and they went down to pass the turn and come again to the ragged wall of earth which terminated the passage. Jerry held the torch and passed it close to the dirt. All was solid. There was no sign of anything wrong. The very pick marks were clearly defined.

“Hold on,” whispered Ronicky Doone. “Hold on, Jerry. I seen something.” He snatched the electric torch, and together they peered at the patch from which the dried earth had fallen.

“Queer for hardpan to break up like that,” muttered Ronicky, cutting into the surface beneath the patch, with the point of his hunting knife. Instantly there was the sharp gritting of steel against steel.

The shout of Ronicky was an indrawn breath. The shout of Jerry Smith was a moan of relief.

Ronicky continued his observations. The thing was very clear. They had dug the tunnel to this point and excavated a place which they had guarded with a steel door, but, in order to conceal the hiding place, or whatever it might be, they cunningly worked the false wall of dirt against the face of it, using clay and a thin coating of plaster as a base.

“It’s a place they don’t use very often, maybe,” said Ronicky, “and that’s why they can afford to put up this fake wall of plaster and mud after every time they want to come down here. Pretty clever to leave that little pile of dirt on the floor, just like it had been worked off by the picks, eh? But we’ve found ’em, Jerry, and now all we got to do is to get to the door and into whatever lies beyond.”

“We’d better hurry, then,” cried Jerry.

“How come?”

“Take a breath.”

Ronicky obeyed; the air was beginning to fill with the pungent and unmistakable odor of burning wood!

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Miracle

No great intelligence was needed to understand the meaning of it. Fernand, having trapped his game, was now about to kill it. He could suffocate the two with smoke, blown into the tunnel, and make them rush blindly out. The moment they appeared, dazed and uncertain, the revolvers of half a dozen gunmen would be emptied into them.

“It’s like taking a trap full of rats,” said Ronicky bitterly, “and shaking them into a pail of water. Let’s go back and see what we can.”

They had only to turn the corner of the tunnel to be sure. Fernand had had the door of the tunnel slid noiselessly open, then, into the tunnel itself, smoking, slowly burning, pungent pieces of pine wood had been thrown, having been first soaked in oil, perhaps. The tunnel was rapidly filling with smoke, and through the white drifts of it they looked into the lighted cellar beyond. They would run out at last, gasping for breath and blinded by the smoke, to be shot down in a perfect light. So much was clear.

“Now back to the wall and try to find that door,” said Ronicky.

Jerry had already turned. In a moment they were back and tearing with their fingers at the sham wall, kicking loose fragments with their feet.

All the time, while they cleared a larger and larger space, they searched feverishly with the electric torch for some sign of a knob which would indicate a door, or some button or spring which might be used to open it. But there was nothing, and in the meantime the smoke was drifting back, in more and more unendurable clouds.

“I can’t stand much more,” declared Jerry at length.

“Keep low. The best air is there,” answered Ronicky.

A voice called from the mouth of the tunnel, and they could recognize the smooth tongue of Frederic Fernand. “Doone, I think I have you now. But trust yourselves to me, and all may still be well with you. Throw out your weapons, and then walk out yourselves, with your arms above your heads, and you may have a second chance. I don’t promise—I simply offer you a hope in the place of no hope at all. Is that a good bargain?”

“I’ll see you hung first,” answered Ronicky and turned again to his work at the wall.

But it seemed a quite hopeless task. The surface of the steel was still covered, after they had cleared it as much as they could, with a thin, clinging coat of plaster which might well conceal the button or device for opening the door. Every moment the task became infinitely harder.

Finally Jerry, his lungs nearly empty of oxygen, cast himself down on the floor and gasped. A horrible gagging sound betrayed his efforts for breath.

Ronicky knelt beside him. His own lungs were burning, and his head was thick and dizzy. “One more try, then we’ll turn and rush them and die fighting, Jerry.”

The other nodded and started to his feet. Together they made that last effort, fumbling with their hands across the rough surface, and suddenly—had they touched the spring, indeed?—a section of the surface before them swayed slowly in. Ronicky caught the half-senseless body of Jerry Smith and thrust him inside. He himself staggered after, and before him stood Ruth Tolliver!

While he lay panting on the floor, she closed the door through which they had come and then stood and silently watched them. Presently Smith sat up, and Ronicky Doone staggered to his feet, his head clearing rapidly.

He found himself in a small room, not more than eight feet square, with a ceiling so low that he could barely stand erect. As for the furnishings and the arrangement, it was more like the inside of a safe than anything else. There were, to be sure, three little stools, but nothing else that one would expect to find in an apartment. For the rest there was nothing but a series of steel drawers and strong chests, lining the walls of the room and leaving in the center very little room in which one might move about.

He had only a moment to see all of this. Ruth Tolliver, hooded in an evening cloak, but with the light gleaming in her coppery hair, was shaking him by the arm and leaning a white face close to him.

“Hurry!” she was saying. “There isn’t a minute to lose. You must start now, at once. They will find out—they will guess—and then—”

“John Mark?” he asked.

“Yes,” she exclaimed, realizing that she had said too much, and she pressed her hand over her mouth, looking at Ronicky Doone in a sort of horror.

Jerry Smith had come to his feet at last, but he remained in the background, staring with a befuddled mind at the lovely vision of the girl. Fear and excitement and pleasure had transformed her face, but she seemed trembling in an agony of desire to be gone. She seemed invincibly drawn to remain there longer still. Ronicky Doone stared at her, with a strange blending of pity and admiration. He knew that the danger was not over by any means, but he began to forget that.

“This way!” called the girl and led toward an opposite door, very low in the wall.

“Lady,” said Ronicky gently, “will you hold on one minute? They won’t start to go through the smoke for a while. They’ll think they’ve choked us, when we don’t come out on the rush, shooting. But they’ll wait quite a time to make sure. They don’t like my style so well that they’ll hurry me.” He smiled sourly at the thought. “And we got time to learn a lot of things that we’ll never find out, unless we know right now, pronto!”

He stepped before the girl, as he spoke. “How come you knew we were in there? How come you to get down here? How come you to risk everything you got to let us out through the treasure room of Mark’s gang?”

He had guessed as shrewdly as he could, and he saw, by her immediate wincing, that the shot had told.

“You strange, mad, wild Westerner!” she exclaimed. “Do you mean to tell me you want to stay here and talk? Even if you have a moment to spare you must use it. If you knew the men with whom you are dealing you would never dream of—”

In her pause he said, smiling: “Lady, it’s tolerable clear that you don’t know me. But the way I figure it is this: a gent may die any time, but, when he finds a minute for good living, he’d better make the most of it.”