Chapter 5: The Attack

Every light of the camp was on as Rawson and his assistant approached. A shallow depression in the sand marked the place where the big casting had been. Beyond it a hundred feet was a black swarm of men that parted as the car drew near. They had been gathered about a figure upon the sand.

Dean sensed something peculiar about that figure as the big car ploughed to a stop. He leaped out and ran forward.

He knew it was Riley there on the ground, knew it while still he was a score of feet away. Only when he was close, however, did he realize that the body ended in two stubs of legs; only when he leaned above him did he know that the Irish foreman’s big frame had been cut in two as if by a knife.

The severed legs lay a short distance beyond the body; they had fallen side by side in horrible awkwardness, their stumps of flesh protruding from charred clothing--and suddenly, shockingly, Rawson knew that the flesh of body and legs had been seared. The knife had been hot--its blade had been forged of flame!

He heard Smithy cursing softly, unconsciously, at his side.

“The green light,” Smithy was saying in horrified understanding. “But who did it? How did they do it? Where did they go?”

“Quiet!” ordered Rawson sharply. He dropped to his knees beside the mutilated body. Riley’s eyes had opened in a sudden movement of consciousness.

The voice that came from his lips was a ghastly whisper at first, but in that stricken thing that had been the body of Riley, foreman of the night drilling crew, some reservoir of strength must still have remained untapped.

He drew upon it now. His voice roared again as it had done so many times before through the Tonah Basin camp. It reached to every listening ear where crowding men stood hushed and motionless; and the overtone of terror that altered its customary timber was apparent to all.

“Devils!” said Riley. “Devils, straight out o’ hell! ... I saw ‘em--I saw ‘em plain! ... I shot--as if hot lead could harm the imps of Satan...

“Oh, sir,”--his eyes had found those of Dean Rawson who was leaning above--”for the love of hivin, Mister Rawson, do ye be quittin’ drillin’. The place is damned. L’ave it, sir; go away...”

His eyes closed. But he started up once more; he raised his head from the sand with one final convulsive movement, and his voice was high and shrill.

“The fire! The fire of hell! He’s turnin’ it on me! God help...”

But Riley, before his failing mind could recall again that torturing jet of flame, must have slipped away into a darkness as softly enveloping as the velvet shadow world behind the low-hung stars. Rawson’s hand that felt for a moment above the heart, confirmed the message of the closed eyes and the head that fell inertly back.

He came slowly to his feet.

“Keep the floods on!” he ordered. “Take command of the armed guard, Smithy; keep the whole camp patrolled.”

Then to the men:

“Boys, Riley was wrong. He believed what he said, all right, but Smith and I know better. Don’t worry about devils. These’re just some dirty, skulking dogs who got away with murder this time but who won’t do it again. We know where they’re hiding. I’m checking up on them right now. After that you’ll all get a chance to square accounts for poor old Riley!”

“But the casting!” Smithy protested when he and Rawson were alone. “You can’t explain that disappearance so easy, Dean.”

“No, I can’t explain that,” Rawson’s words came slowly. “They’ve got something that we don’t understand as yet--but I’m going to know the answer, and I’m going to find out to-night!”

He was seated behind the wheel of his old car.

“I’m as good a desert man as there is in this crowd,” he told Smith. “And it’s my fight, you know. I’m going alone. But there’ll be no fighting this trip; I’ll just be scouting around.”

He leaned from the car to grip Smithy’s shoulder with a hand firm and steady.

“You didn’t see the crater when the show was on. You think that I’m crazy to believe it, but up in that crater is where I’ll find the answer to a lot of questions. Lord knows what that answer will be. I’ve quit trying to guess. I’m just going up there to find out.”

He was gone, the rear wheels of the car throwing a spray of sand as he started heedless of Smithy’s protests against the plan. Rawson was in no mood to argue. He must climb the mountain while it was night; under the sun he would never reach the top alive. He would go alone and unseen.

He swung wide of the deserted town at the mountain’s base. The spectral walls of Little Rhyolite still showed their empty windows that stared like dead eyes, and the man guided his car without lights along a hidden stretch of hard, salt-crusted desert. He felt certain that other eyes were watching.

He began his climb at a point five miles away. The slopes that seemed smooth and hard from a distance became, at closer range, a place of wind-heaped, sandy ash, carved and scoured into fantastic forms. But its very roughness offered protection, and Rawson fought the dragging sand, and the gray, choking ash that dried his throat and cut it like emery, without fear of being observed.

He fought against time, too. Above Little Rhyolite, whatever mysterious men were making the ascent would find the going easy. There were windswept areas, long fields of pumice; a man could make good time there. Rawson had none of these to aid him. He cast anxious glances toward the eastern sky as he struggled on, till he saw gray light change to rose and gold--but he stood in the titanic cleft in the crater’s rim as the first straight rays of the sun struck across.

The volcano’s top had been stripped clean by the winds of countless years. Rocks, black, brown, even blood-red, were naked to the pitiless glare of the sun. Their colors were mingled in a weird fantasy of twisted lines that told of the inferno of heat in which they had been formed.

They towered high above the head of Dean Rawson as he stood, panting and trembling with exhaustion. The cleft before him had become enormous: it was a canyon, half filled with pumice and coarse ash.

Rawson stood for long minutes in quiet listening. At the canyon’s end would lie the crater, and in that crater he would find ... But there was no slightest picture in his mind of what he might see. He knew only that he himself must remain unseen. He went forward cautiously.

Rocky walls; a floor of sand where his feet left no mark. He was watching ahead and above him. His gun was ready in his hand; he did not propose to be ambushed. He moved with never a sound.

The silence persisted; no living thing other than himself lent any flicker of motion to the scene. Not even a lizard could hope for existence amid these dead and barren heights. He was alone--the certainty of it had driven deeply into his mind before the canyon end was reached. And, desert man though he was and accustomed to traveling the waste places of the earth, Rawson learned a new meaning and depth of solitude.