CHAPTER XI.
A DROP IN THE DARK.
"Hark!"
It was Jack who uttered the exclamation.
The shouts were growing louder. Evidently the Mexicans had kept acloser watch than he or Pete had imagined, and had quickly taken alarmat the prolonged absence of their companion.
The boy could hear them battering the oak door of the cell they had sorecently occupied.
"Let 'em batter away," muttered Pete. "I shot the bolt on the inside."
To his amazement, Jack actually heard his companion chuckle. What couldthe cow-puncher be made of, steel or granite, or a combination of both!
And now Pete began to wriggle along the ledge, pressing with all hisweight against the wall.
"Come on," he breathed to Jack, "throw all your weight inward and don'tlook up or down."
In mortal fear of finding his body hurtling backward into vacancy atany moment, the boy followed the intrepid cow-puncher along the narrowfootpath. Perhaps it needed more pluck on his part to proceed along theinsecure ledge in the pitchy blackness than it did on the part of thenervy cow-puncher. Who shall take the exact measure of courage?
At last they reached the angle of the tower, and Pete stood still. Toproceed round the sharp angle, on no wider pathway than that which theytrod, would be manifestly impossible. Yet go on they must. SuddenlyPete gave a cry of joy. Looking down into the darkness, he had seen,not more than ten feet beneath them, the sharp ridge of an additionto the old Mission church. If they could reach that he knew, fromcalculating the height of the tower, they would not be far from theground.
Behind them the yells and shouts were growing louder.
To think, with Pete, was to act. With a muttered prayer, one of thefew he had ever uttered in his rough life, the cow-puncher crouched aswell as he could on the ledge. Putting over first one leg and then theother, he deliberately dropped downward, till his hands gripped theedge of the ledge on which a second before he had stood. His musclescracked as the sudden strain came on them, but he held fast, and asecond later let go. He landed to his intense joy, on a rough tiledroof, after an easy drop of not more than four feet.
"Come on," he breathed upward to Jack, who had watched thecow-puncher's daring act with horrified eyes.
"I--I can't," shivered the boy, who, plucky as he was, dreaded the ideaof a drop into the dark. "You go on, Pete, and leave me."
"Not much I won't. You make that drop, or I'll give you the biggesthiding you ever had, Jack Merrill, when I get hold of you."
The cowboy had hit on just the words to bring Jack to the proper pitchto take the leap.
"You ain't scared, are you?" whispered up Pete, determined to bracethe boy up in the way he knew would prove most effective.
Just as Pete had done a few moments previously, Jack, without a word,knelt for one awful second on the brink of space and then gingerlyput over first one leg and then the other. Then followed the sameterrible rush into blackness that Pete had experienced, and the samesoul-sickening jolt and heart-leap as his fingers gripped, and he hungsafe.
"Drop!" snapped Pete.
Jack's fingers obediently unclasped their desperate grip, and he shotdownward to be caught in Pete's arms.
"Not so bad when you get used to it," whispered the cow-puncher. "Nowthen, slide down."
"Slide down--where?"
"This rope. While you were getting ready up there"--even in the darkJack felt his cheeks flush--"while you were getting ready up there, Ifastened that greaser's rope to this old water-spout. All you got to dois to slide down."
A second later Jack flashed down the side of the old church to theground, where, almost as soon as he had landed, Coyote Pete joined him.
"What now?" asked Jack amazedly. He had never dreamed when they stoodon that dizzy tower that in less than ten minutes they would be on firmground. Nor did he forget how much of the so-far successful escape wasdue to Coyote Pete's skill and resourcefulness. But the hardest andmost dangerous part was yet to come.
Already the whole of the old church was aglow with lights, flashinghither and thither, and outside, shout answered shout from a dozenpoints of the compass.
"We'll run in the direction where there is the least racket," wiselydecided Pete.
"Crouch as low as you can, Jack," he ordered, as, doubled almost inhalf, he darted off into the darkness.
Imitating his guide as best he could, Jack followed, but as ill-luckwould have it, their way led past an old well. In the pitch blacknessthe boy did not avoid what Pete seemed to have steered clear of byinstinct. With a crash that woke the echoes, he blundered headlong intoa big pile of tin buckets and pails which had been placed there thatday. A bull running amuck in a tin shop could hardly have made morenoise.
"My great aunt alkali, you've done it now!" growled Pete, as theterrific crash sounded close behind him.
"Oh, go on, Pete! Go on, and leave me," cried Jack miserably. "I'llonly hamper you. Go on by yourself."
"I'll go with you or not at all," was Pete's firm rejoinder. "Come on,now, hurry. They're bound to have heard that, and they'll be 'roundhere like so many hornets in a minute."
Pete's prophecy proved correct. Hardly had the clanging, clashingechoes of the avalanche of dislodged tinware died out, before theyheard Black Ramon's voice shouting:
"Over there! Over there by the well. Fire at them."
Jack did not know much Spanish, but he could comprehend this.
"Fire away," muttered Pete grimly, as they rapidly wormed their wayalong among the scrub. "You'll not do us any harm by shooting at thewell, but you'll drill your rotten tinware full of holes."
But the Mexicans having now recovered from their first excitement,turned their thoughts to other ways of getting back the fugitives thanby firing into the darkness after them. To the ears of Jack and Petewas soon borne the trample of horses, and the rattle of gallopinghoofs, as Black Ramon's men spread out through the darkness looking forthem.
"They're going to form a ring," he whispered, as they squirmed theirway along; "that's what they're going to do. They know we are withouthorses or weapons, and that if they only make the ring large enoughthey're bound to get us."
On and on they crept, so close to the ground that the burning dust,which had a plentiful ad-mixture of alkali in it, filled their eyes andnose. Pete was more or less used to the stuff, having ridden sometimesfor days at a time in it behind herds of cattle or horses, but to Jackthe smarting sensation in mouth and nostrils was almost unbearable. Thestuff fairly choked him.
Suddenly Pete's hand shot out and gripped Jack's arm with a viselikepressure. Jack interpreted the signal without a word.
"Stop!"
Down they both crouched in the alkali dust among the brush, hardlydaring to breathe.
Long before Jack's ears had caught a sound, Pete's quick eye haddetected something. He laid his ear to the ground.
"Too dry," he muttered, after holding it there an instant.
Then he drew from his pocket his knife and opened both blades. Thelarger he thrust into the earth and placed his ear against the smallerbit of steel.
"Just as I thought. Coming this way!" he muttered. "We'll have to lielow and trust to luck."
Presently the trampling that the cowboy's rough-and-ready telegraph haddetected became distinctly audible, and against the star-spattered skyJack saw two black figures on horseback slowly rise up from a hollow.They came into view as slowly as fairies rising to the stage from atrap-door in a theatre.
Neither Pete nor Jack dared to breathe, as the two figures appeared andpaused as if undecided which way to go. Suddenly one of them began tospeak.
"No sign of 'em in here, amigo. Say ombre, I tell you what--you rideoff to the right, and I'll take the left trail. We've covered all theother ground, and that way we're bound to get 'em."
The Mexican grunted something and rode off in the direction the otherhad indicated.
"It's Jim Cummings, the dern skunk," whispered Coyote Pete to Jack, hisindignation
at the idea of being hunted by the renegade cowboy gettingthe better of his prudence.
For one terrible minute Jack thought they had been discovered. JimCummings, who had been riding off, stopped his pony abruptly and facedround in the saddle.
"Queer," he said to himself; "thought I heard something. Guess I'lltake a look and see if the critters left any trail through hereabouts.I wouldn't trust myself alone with Coyote Pete, but I know he's got noshooting iron, and I reckon this will fetch down a dozen like him, orthe kid with him."
He patted his revolver--a big forty-four--as he spoke, and dismounted.Throwing his pony's reins over his head, in plainsman's fashion, therenegade struck a match and bent down toward the ground. He was lookingto see if Jack or Coyote Pete had passed that way.
What happened then came so quickly that afterward, when he tried totell it, Jack never could get the successive incidents arranged clearlyin his own mind. All that was audible was a frightened gasp from therenegade as the glare of a match fell on Coyote Pete's face. Wet withsweat, plastered with dust, and disfigured by righteous anger at therenegade, Pete's countenance was indeed one to inspire terror in theperson suddenly lighting upon it.
Before the gasp had died out of Jim cummings' throat, and before hecould utter the cry that somehow refused to come, Coyote Pete, witha spring like that of a maddened cougar, was on him, and bore himearthward with a mighty crash.
"Take that, you coward, you sneak, you traitor!" he snarledvindictively under his breath, as the unfortunate Jim Cummingsstruggled and his breath came in sharp wheezes. As he spoke, CoyotePete, temporarily transformed by rage and scorn to a wild beast,savagely hammered Jim Cummings' head against the ground.
He was recalled to himself by Jack, who, after his first moment ofstartled surprise, realized that unless he interfered Cummings would inall likelihood be killed.
"Pete, Pete, are you mad?" he gasped, seizing the other's arm andstaying it, as the furious cow-puncher was about to bring it crashingdown into the renegade's face.
"Mad!" repeated Pete, looking up, "well, I guess so. But I'm glad youbrought me to my senses, son. I'd hate to have the blood of such avarmint as this on my conscience."
He rose to his feet, still breathing heavily from his furious outburst.
"Phew! but that did me good," he said, rolling the unconscious Cummingsover with a contemptuous foot. "I reckon this coyote won't go huntinghis own people with a pack of yellow dogs for a long time to come."
Pete was right, it was many a day before Cummings got over histhrashing, but in the meantime the delay occasioned by Pete's outbreakcame near to costing them dear.
A sudden trampling in the darkness behind them made them turn, andthey saw dimly the figure of a horseman behind them. The starlightglinted on his rifle barrel as he aimed it at them and covered both thefugitives beyond hope of escape.
"Up your hands!"
The command came from the new arrival in broken, but none the lessvigorous and unmistakable English.