Tucking his prize through his belt, where the rag-wound end kept it from slipping through, Bill turned and headed back toward the now-visible notch in the moonlit cliff from which his cord, invisible at this distance, was dangling.
The moon was round and full over the valley by this time, but an intermittent cloudiness hid its face from time to time, so that light became dark. This seemed like a good omen—offering a chance for him to cross the relatively open area between the last of the buildings and the fringe of brush and trees at the base of the cliff, without any chance observer from the outlaw buildings happening to glance out and see him moving. Accordingly, when he reached the edge of the shadow of the final building, he hesitated until a cloud hid the moon, and then made a dash for the nearest place of concealment, a small hollow in the valley floor perhaps fifty yards away.
He made it, and dropped flat, just as the moon came out from behind its cloud. But as he lay hugging the earth, he stiffened suddenly in apprehension.
He was lying face downward, with his head turned to one side and his ear pressed against the still-warm earth beneath the short grass. To that ear there had come the momentary sound of thudding feet—before it abruptly ceased and silence took its place.
The cloud that was just beginning to cover the moon with its fleecy, thin, outer edge was a dark and long one. It looked fully long enough to allow Bill to make it the rest of the hundred yards to the cliff and the cover of the undergrowth at the base of the cliff. He held his breath as the dark part of the cloud began to cover the moon. The light faded abruptly—and all at once it was dark.
At once, Bill was on his feet and running for the cliff. But his ears were alert now, and as he ran he was almost certain that he could hear, in time to his own pounding feet, the thud of heavier ones behind him. Winded and panting, but still under the safe cover of darkness, he saw the deeper shadow of the brush and trees at the foot of the cliff, looming up before him. A second later, he was among them. Ducking off to his right, heedless of the branches that lashed at his face and body, he ran off from the main line of his flight for about thirty feet or so, and stopped, as still as the shadows from the moonlight about him, striving to control the panting of his oxygen-exhausted lungs.
Darkness still held the valley. But now there was no doubt about it. Now that he was stopped, Bill heard plainly the heavy sound of his running pursuer come up to and crash into the undergrowth at the base of the cliff—then stop in his turn.
Suddenly there was silence all around. Bill stood, holding his breath—and, somewhere hidden in the darkness less than twenty or thirty feet away, whoever had been following him was standing, holding
his
breath.
Bill was abruptly conscious of the hard length of the hammer to the valley gong beneath his belt. He backed away along the base of the cliff and looked about, trying to find his rope, or at least the cleft in the top edge of the cliff from which it hung.
However, from this angle of vision—right underneath the cliff, with the bushes and the trees close about him in the now once more brilliant moonlight, the rope seemed nowhere in sight. He hesitated, trying to decide which way he would move to look for it and then, at that moment, he heard a sound that checked him in mid-movement.
It was the sound of a bush rustling less than twenty feet from him.
His pursuer had been closer than he thought. Bill turned desperately to the cliff beside him. It was pitted enough by cracks and holes so that it was just possible he might be able to climb it. He turned to the cliff-face and began to climb.
He went up as noiselessly as he could. For the first eight or ten feet, he made swift and quiet progress. But then, he reached upward with his right leg for a foothold upon a small projection from the cliff-face—and it broke beneath his boot sole.
With a sound that seemed to Bill's tense ears to be like the roar of an avalanche, the broke piece of rock and a few shards of cliff-face it had carried away with it, went cascading down to the bushes below. And with that, everything began to happen very swiftly.
He scrabbled frantically with his unsupported foot for a new resting place. But, as he did so, there was a tearing, rushing sound through the bushes below him, and something that sounded like a snarl of animal triumph. At the same time, the strain of his body weight upon his two hands and remaining foot proved too much for their precarious grasp upon the cliff-face.
The support beneath his other foot gave way suddenly, and he fell, spread-eagled backward, outward into darkness and downward toward the ground, fifteen or twenty feet below.
As he fell backward through the darkness, Bill instinctively tried to roll himself about in midair as he had learned in Survival School, and land on his feet. But the distance was too short. Even as he tried to relax in expectation of a bone-shattering concussion against the hard ground at the foot of the cliff, his fall was interrupted.
He found himself, unexpectedly, caught in midair—by what appeared to be two very large and capable hands.
"So it's you, Pick-and-Shovel!" the voice of Bone Breaker rumbled above him. "I thought it was you. Didn't I get your promise you wouldn't come back here, except in daylight?"
He set Bill on his feet, as the moonlight broke finally free of all clouds and they saw each other clearly. Bill looked up at the towering, coal-black Dilbian form. His mind was racing. He had never thought faster in his life.
"Well," he said, "I wanted to talk to you privately—"
"Privately? That's a Shorty for you!" said Bone Breaker. "Don't you know that if anybody found out we've been talking together privately, anything might happen? Why, people would be likely to start guessing all sorts of things! But here you show up—"
He broke off abruptly, staring down at Bill.
"By the way," he asked in a tone of puzzlement, "just how did you get here, anyhow? The guards in the gates didn't let you in. And there's no way you could get over the stockade fence in the dark."
Bill took a deep breath and gambled that the truth would serve him better at this point than anything short of subterfuge. He pointed up the wall of the cliff alongside them.
"I climbed down there," he said.
Bone Breaker continued to stare at him for a long moment. Then the Dilbian outlaw chief's eyes moved slowly away from him and lifted, traveling up the sheer face of the cliff.
"You—" the words came out of him slowly with long, incredulous pauses in between, "came down that?"
"Why, certainly!" said Bill determinedly and cheerfully, "we Shorties can climb almost anything. Why, back on my own world once, I—"
"Never mind that," rumbled Bone Breaker. His eyes came back down to focus on Bill's face. "If you came down it, I suppose you can get back up it, again?"
"Well . . . yes," said Bill, a little reluctantly, his fall of a moment before fresh in his mind. "I can climb it, all right."
"Then you better get going," said Bone Breaker—not so much angrily as emphatically. "You don't know how lucky you are it was me who spotted you sneaking around the buildings, back there, instead of it being one of our regular watchmen. It's just a happy chance for you that I like to take a stroll around myself every evening before I turn in, just to see that everything's all right. Why, you could've spoiled everything!"
"Everything?" echoed Bill frowning.
"Why, certainly," rumbled Bone Breaker reprovingly. "Why would anybody think you'd be here, except to have that duel with me? And what's the point of having a duel at this time of night, with no real light to see by and hardly anybody around? No, no, Pick-and-Shovel. You've got to get this sort of thing straight in your Shorty head. Something like our duel has to be held in broad daylight. With everybody looking on, too. I want everybody up in the valley, and watching. And as many villagers as can get here, as well." His voice took on, strange as it seemed, almost a wistful note. "It's just too bad we can't send runners out with the word so that anyone in the district could drop by. But, I suppose that'd be overdoing it."
"Er—yes," agreed Bill.
"Well, anyway," said Bone Breaker, his voice becoming suddenly brisk, "you'd better get started. Up that cliff with you and out of sight—and remember! Whatever you do, Pick-and-Shovel, make sure it's daylight when you come back again. Full daylight!"
"I will," promised Bill. He turned to the cliff-face without any further hesitation and carefully began to climb. Some ten feet above the ground, he paused to look down. The moon was out from behind its clouds, and by its light he saw the outlaw chief staring up at him. As he watched, Bone Breaker shook his head a little, as if in amazement, and then turned and went off toward the buildings, just as the moon slid once more behind a cloud, and darkness covered the scene.
As soon as the face of the cliff was cloaked in shadow, Bill ceased climbing. Cautiously, feeling his way with hands and feet in the gloom with his heart thudding, Bill climbed back down slowly onto solid ground. When at last he stood firmly upright upon it, he found his face was wet with perspiration. A single misstep on the way down could have set him falling, the way he had done once already. And this time, there would have been no Bone Breaker to catch him.
However, now that he was safely on his feet again, he began to work his way along the base of the cliff until he reached a spot where he was completely hidden by the undergrowth. Here he waited until the moon once more emerged from its cloud, and, looking up, he was able to make out the notch at the top of the cliff from which his rope descended.
It was still a little farther to his right. He continued on and came at last to the rope itself, nearly invisible in the moonlight against the light-colored rock of the cliff-face.
The climb required a number of stops to rest along the way. Whenever he found a spot where he could lean or crouch against the cliff-face to rest those muscles of his arms and legs which had been bearing his weight during the climb, he did so. In spite of this, by the time he could look up and see the bottom of the notch only ten or twelve feet above him, Bill was as exhausted as he could remember being.
He had no idea, as he paused for a final rest upon a ledge of rock outcropping from the vertical face, how long the upward climb had taken. It seemed to have taken hours. However, no alarm had so far been raised that would indicate anyone had caught sight of him. After resting on the rock ledge as long as he dared, without risking the stiffening of his weary muscles, Bill geared up his courage and his remaining energy for the last stretch to the bottom of the notch. Then he began to climb.
It was hard work. With each foot gained upward, he felt the already shallow reserves of his strength ebbing away. Eventually, the bottom of the notch came within view, but still more than an arm's reach away. Bill locked his feet in the rope and started to let go with his right hand in order to reach upward.
—And his exhaustion-weakened left hand almost let go.
Clutching desperately at the rope with both hands, Bill clung to his position. There seemed to be no strength left in him. For a second, a giddy picture of his grip finally loosening on the rope as he hung here, and his plunge to certain death at the foot of the cliff swam through his mind.
—And then he moved.
He moved upward. He and the rope together lifted a good four feet until the notch was almost level with his eyes. Before he could grasp what had happened, the rope lifted again, carrying him with it. Someone above was hauling it upward, pulling him to the safety of the cliff-top.
Wildly and unexpectedly it came to him that possibly the Bluffer had returned, although he was not due until dawn—or had stayed in position above the cliff, and was now bringing him up to safe and level ground. Bill looked upward, expecting to see the dark, furry mass of the Dilbian postman staring down at him. But it was not the Bluffer he saw.
He stared instead into the moonlit, Buddha-like countenance of Mula-
ay
. The hands of the Hemnoid had hold of the rope. The great, heavy-gravity muscles of the alien were bringing it easily in, and there was a smile of pure, gentle joy on Mula-
ay
's face. Like a hooked fish, Bill was being drawn helplessly upward into the hands of his enemy.
If the shock and dismay that Bill felt were strong, they were overridden just at that moment by the prospect of getting off the cliff-face and onto the level top of the cliff, no matter with whose help. He clung desperately to the rope and let himself be pulled in, until at last he was hauled over the edge of the notch and collapsed weakly upon the soft ground above the vertical rock-face.
For a moment, he simply lay there, almost too weak to move, his arms and legs trembling from the strain they had just endured. Then, painfully, he let go of the rope and struggled to his feet.
Directly in front of him, and less than six feet away, with his arms now folded across his chest within the voluminous sleeves of his yellow robe, Mula-
ay
continued to smile contentedly at him in the moonlight.
"Well, well, my young friend," said Mula-
ay
, with a heavy, liquid chuckle. "And what are you doing here at this time of night?"
Bill had had a chance to collect his wits. As it had in the moment at the foot of the cliff when he first found himself facing Bone Breaker, his mind was racing swiftly, turning up conclusions rapidly as it went.
"Why, I was just out," said Bill, panting slightly in spite of his attempts to appear calm, "for a little sport rock-climbing. Suppose you tell me what you're doing here."
Mula-
ay
laughed again.
"Why, of course I could tell an untruth just like you, my young friend," replied the Hemnoid, "and say I just happened to be out for a moonlight stroll. But people like myself are always truthful—particularly when the truth hurts—and I'll tell you the truth. I was out here looking for you, and, behold, I have found you."