The Hunted Woman Part 23

Listen!"

The gloom was thickening swiftly. The black mountain was fading slowly away, and up out of that gloom came now ghostly and far-reaching voices of men booming faintly through giant megaphones.

"_Clear away! Clear away! Clear away!_" they said, and the valley and the mountain-sides caught up the echoes, until it seemed that a hundred voices were crying out the warning. Then fell a strange and weird silence, and the echoes faded away like the voices of dying men, and all was still save the far-away barking of a coyote that answered the mysterious challenges of the night. Joanne was close to the rock. Quietly the men who had been working on the battery drew back.

"It is ready!" said one.

"Wait!" said Blackton, as his wife went to speak, "Listen!"

For five minutes there was silence. Then out of the night a single megaphone cried the word:

"_Fire!_"

"All is clear," said the engineer, with a deep breath. "All you have to do, Miss Gray, is to move that little lever from the side on which it now rests to the opposite side. Are you ready?"

In the darkness Joanne's left hand had sought John's. It clung to his tightly. He could feel a little s.h.i.+ver run through her.

"Yes," she whispered.

"Then--if you please--press the b.u.t.ton!"

Slowly Joanne's right hand crept out, while the fingers of her left clung tighter to Aldous. She touched the b.u.t.ton--thrust it over. A little cry that fell from between her tense lips told them she had done the work, and a silence like that of death fell on those who waited.

A half a minute--perhaps three quarters--and a s.h.i.+ver ran under their feet, but there was no sound; and then a black pall, darker than the night, seemed to rise up out of the mountain, and with that, a second later, came the explosion. There was a rumbling and a jarring, as if the earth were convulsed under foot; volumes of dense black smoke shot upward, and in another instant these rolling, twisting volumes of black became lurid, and an explosion like that of a thousand great guns rent the air. As fast as the eye could follow sheets of flame shot up out of the sea of smoke, climbing higher and higher, in lightning flashes, until the lurid tongues licked the air a quarter of a mile above the startled wilderness. Explosion followed explosion, some of them coming in hollow, reverberating booms, others sounding as if in midair. Unseen by the watchers, the heavens were filled with hurtling rocks; solid ma.s.ses of granite ten feet square were thrown a hundred feet away; rocks weighing a ton were hurled still farther, as if they were no more than stones flung by the hands of a giant; chunks that would have crashed from the roof to the bas.e.m.e.nt of a skysc.r.a.per dropped a third of a mile away. For three minutes the frightful convulsions continued, and the tongues of flame leaped into the night. Then the lurid lights died out, shorter and shorter grew the sullen flashes, and then again fell--silence!

During those appalling moments, unconscious of the act, Joanne had shrank close to Aldous, so that he felt the soft crush of her hair and the swift movement of her bosom. Blackton's voice brought them back to life.

He laughed, and it was the laugh of a man who had looked upon work well done.

"It has done the trick," he said. "To-morrow we will come and see. And I have changed my plans about Coyote Number Twenty-eight. Hutchins, the superintendent, is pa.s.sing through in the afternoon, and I want him to see it." He spoke now to a man who had come up out of the darkness. "Gregg, have Twenty-eight ready at four o'clock to-morrow afternoon--four o'clock--sharp!"

Then he said:

"Dust and a bad smell will soon be settling about us. Come, let's go home!"

And as they went back to the buckboard wagon through the gloom John Aldous still held Joanne's hand in his own, and she made no effort to take it from him.

CHAPTER XVIII

The next morning, when Aldous joined the engineer in the dining-room below, he was disappointed to find the breakfast table prepared for two instead of four. It was evident that Peggy Blackton and Joanne were not going to interrupt their beauty nap on their account.

Blackton saw his friend's inquiring look, and chuckled.

"Guess we'll have to get along without 'em this morning, old man. Lord bless me, did you hear them last night--after you went to bed?"

"No."

"You were too far away," chuckled Blackton again, "I was in the room across the hall from them. You see, old man, Peggy sometimes gets fairly starved for the right sort of company up here, and last night they didn't go to bed until after twelve o'clock. I looked at my watch. Mebby they were in bed, but I could hear 'em buzzing like two bees, and every little while they'd giggle, and then go on buzzing again. By George, there wasn't a break in it! When one let up the other'd begin, and sometimes I guess they were both going at once. Consequently, they're sleeping now."

When breakfast was finished Blackton looked at his watch.

"Seven o'clock," he said. "We'll leave word for the girls to be ready at nine. What are you going to do meantime, Aldous?"

"Hunt up MacDonald, probably."

"And I'll run down and take a look at the work."

As they left the house the engineer nodded down the road. MacDonald was coming.

"He has saved you the trouble," he said. "Remember, Aldous--nine o'clock sharp!"

A moment later Aldous was advancing to meet the old mountaineer.

"They've gone, Johnny," was Donald's first greeting.

"Gone?"

"Yes. The whole bunch--Quade, Culver Rann, DeBar, and the woman who rode the bear. They've gone, hide and hair, and n.o.body seems to know where."

Aldous was staring.

"Also," resumed old Donald slowly, "Culver Rann's outfit is gone--twenty horses, including six saddles. An' likewise others have gone, but I can't find out who."

"Gone!" repeated Aldous again.

MacDonald nodded.

"And that means----"

"That Culver Rann ain't lost any time in gettin' under way for the gold,"

said Donald. "DeBar is with him, an' probably the woman. Likewise three cut-throats to fill the other saddles. They've gone prepared to fight."

"And Quade?"

Old Donald hunched his shoulders, and suddenly John's face grew dark and hard.

"I understand," he spoke, half under his breath. "Quade has disappeared--but he isn't with Culver Rann. He wants us to believe he has gone. He wants to throw us off our guard. But he's watching, and waiting--somewhere--like a hawk, to swoop down on Joanne! He----"

"That's it!" broke in MacDonald hoa.r.s.ely. "That's it, Johnny! It's his old trick--his old trick with women. There's a hunderd men who've got to do his bidding--do it 'r get out of the mountains--an' we've got to watch Joanne.

We have, Johnny! If she should disappear----"

Aldous waited.

"You'd never find her again, so 'elp me G.o.d, you wouldn't, Johnny!" he finished.