Two Thousand Miles Below Part 3

He adjusted the recording mechanism himself and stood beside the twenty-inch casing that held back the loose sand from the big bore.

Then he watched ten sections of cable, each a mile in length, each heavier than the last, as they went hissing into the earth.

From the cable control shed the voice of Riley was calling the depth.

"Fifty-two thousand." Then by hundreds until he cried: "Fifty-two-seven. We're into the big cave! Now another hundred feet."

The cable was moving slowly. In the middle of Riley's call of "Fifty-two-eight," a jangling bell told that the bottom of the pyrometer carrier had touched.

"Up with it," Smithy ordered. "Make it snappy. We'll see if we've got another cargo of gold."

There was an undeniable thrill in this reaching to a tremendous distance underground, this groping about in a deep-hidden cave, where molten gold was to be found. What had they tapped?--he asked himself.

He saw visions of some vast pool of hot, liquid gold. Perhaps Dean would have to change his plans. They could rig up some kind of a bailer; they could bring out thousands of dollars at a time.

He was watching for the first sight of the metal carrier, far more interested in what might be clinging to it than in the record of the pyrometer it held. He saw it emerge--then he stared in disbelief at the stubby ma.s.s at the cable's end, where all that remained of the long tube he had sent down was a dangling two feet of discolored metal, warped and distorted. The lower part, a full twenty feet in length, had been fused cleanly off.

Dean Rawson was there to watch the next attempt. Again Riley's roaring ba.s.s rolled out the count, but this time the call stopped at fifty-two-seven. The jangling bell told that the carrier had touched.

"Divil a bit do I understand this," Riley was calling. "We're right at the point where we dropped through into the clear. Right at the roof of the big cave--fifty-two-seven, it says--and no lower do we go. The bottom of the hole is plugged!"

Rawson made no reply. He was scowling while he stared speculatively at the mouth of the twenty-inch bore--a vertical tunnel that led from the drilling floor down, down to some inner vault. "Molten gold," he was thinking. "It melted a cylinder of the new Krieger alloy--melted it when its melting point is way higher than that of any rock that we've hit. And now the bore is closed...."

He was trying vainly to project his mental vision through those miles of hard rock to see what manner of mystery this was into which he had probed. He shook his head slowly in baffled speculation, then spoke sharply.

"Drill it out!" he ordered. "We're into a hot spot sure enough, though I can't just figure out the how of it. But we'll tame it, Smithy. Send down the drill. Clean it out. Then we'll poke around down there and get the answer to all this."

Five days were needed to send down the big drill with a new drill-head replacing the other too fouled with gold for any use. The tubular sections, a hundred feet in length, were hooked together and lowered one by one. Each joint meant the coupling of the air-pipe as well.

Air, mixed with water from the outer jacket, must come foaming up through the central core to bring the powdered rock to the surface.

Five days, then one hour of boring, and another five days to pull out the drill before Rawson could hope for his answer. But he found it in the severed shaft of the great drill where the head had been melted completely off. The big stem that would have resisted all but electric furnace heat, and been cut through like a tallow candle in the blast of an oxy-acetylene flame.

CHAPTER III

_Red Drops_

The flat-roofed shack of yellow boards that was Dean Rawson's "office"

had a second canopy roof built above it and extending out on all sides like a wooden umbrella. Thick pitch fried almost audibly from the fir boards when the sun drove straight from overhead, but beneath their shelter the heat was more bearable.

By an open window, where a hot breeze stirred sluggishly, Rawson sat in silent contemplation of the camp. His face was as copper-colored as an Apache's and as motionless. His eyes were fixed unwaveringly upon a distant derrick and the blasted stub of a big drill that hung unmoving above the concrete floor.

But the man's eyes did not consciously record the details of that scene. He saw nothing of the derrick or of the heat waves that made the steel seem writhingly alive; he was looking at something far more distant, something many miles away, something vague and mysterious, hidden miles beneath the surface of the earth.

"Heat," he said at last, as if talking in a dream. "Heat, terrific temperatures--but I can't make it out; I can't see it!"

The younger, broad-shouldered man, whose khaki s.h.i.+rt, thrown open at the neck showed a chest tanned to the black-brown of his face, stopped his restless pacing back and forth in the hot room.

"Yes?" he asked with a touch of irritation in his tone. "There's plenty of heat there--heat enough to melt off the shaft of that high-temp alloy! What the devil's the use of wondering about the heat, Dean? What gets me is this: the shaft has been plugged again. Now, what kind of...."

Dean Rawson's face had not moved a muscle during the other's outburst.

His eyes were still fixed on that place that was so far away, yet which he tried to bring close in his mind, close enough to see, to comprehend the mystery that should be so plain.

"Lava wouldn't do it!" he said softly. "No melted stone would melt the Krieger alloy, unless it was under pressure, which this was not.

There was no blast coming out of our shaft. Yet we dipped into that gold; we stuck the drill right down into it. But what did we go into the next time? What did we dip into?"

He swung quickly, violently, toward Smithy who was facing him from the middle of the room. He aimed one finger at him as if it were a pistol, and his words cracked out as sharply as if they came from a gun:

"That tube you sent down--that piece of casing! How was it burned?

Were there straggling ends, frozen gobs of metal? Did it look like an old-fas.h.i.+oned mola.s.ses candy bar that's been melted? Did it?"

"Why, no," said Smithy. "It hadn't dripped any; it was cut off nice and clean."

"Cut!" Rawson almost shouted the word. "You said it, Smithy. So was the shaft of the drill. And if you ever saw a piece of this alloy being melted you know that it's as gummy as a pot of old paint. It was cut, Smithy! Dipping into that melted gold threw us off the track; we were thinking of ramming the drill down into a mess of lava. But we didn't. It was cut off by a blast of flame so much hotter than lava that melted rock would seem cold!"

"And that helps us a lot, doesn't it," asked Smithy, scornfully, "when the flame melts the end of the shaft shut as fast as we open it?"

Dean Rawson's lean, muscular hands took Smithy's broad shoulders and spun the younger man around. "Cheer up," Dean told him. "We've got it licked. Why it doesn't blow out of that shaft like h.e.l.l out for noon is more than I can see; but the heat's there! We've won!"

"But--" Smithy began. Rawson sent him spinning toward the door in a good-natured showing of strength that his a.s.sistant had not yet guessed.

"Soup!" he ordered. "Break out the nitroglycerine, Smithy. Get that Swede, Hanson, on the job; he's a shooter. He knows his stuff. We'll blow open the bottom end of our shaft so it'll never go shut!"

Hanson knew his stuff and did it. But he met Rawson's inquiring eyes with a puzzled shake of his head when the open mouth of the twenty-inch bore gave faint echo of the deep explosion and followed after a time with only a feeble puff of air.

"Like a cannon, she should have gone," Hanson stated. "And she yoost go _phht_!"

"It's open down below," said Rawson briefly. "This is a different kind of a well from the kind you've been shooting."

To the waiting Riley he said: "Hook a bailer onto that cable and send it down. See what you can tell about the hole."

Again ten miles of cable hissed smoothly down the gaping throat. Then it slowed.

"Fifty-two-seven," said Riley, "and she's open. Seven twenty-five!

Seven fifty, and we're on bottom!"

"Up," Rawson ordered, "if there's anything left of the bailer. It's probably melted into sc.r.a.p."

But strangely it was not. It hung from the dangling cable spinning lazily until Riley stepped in to check its motion.

There was a check valve in the bottom--a door that opened inwardly, to take in water and fragments of rock when need arose. Riley, disregarding the possible heat of the twirling bailer, reached for it with bare hands. He drew them back, then held them before him--and a hundred watching eyes saw what had been unseen before: the slow dropping of red liquid from the bailer's end. The same drops were falling from Riley's hands that had touched that end.