The Yellow Hoard

CHAPTER XVI One Way Out

The entrance to the temple room was blocked so that an army of elephants could not have gotten through to outer air. Several dozen monolithic slabs, each weighing tons, had slid from the ponderous temple roof and shut the temple forever from the outside world.

Smitty got from the depths of his tunnel first. He was running, for all his vast size and weight, like a fleet youngster. He emerged into the rear two-thirds of the room, which was all that was left.

“Miss Gray!” he yelled. “Nellie—”

He stopped. She wasn’t under the rock pile locking them in here forever. She was crouching at the rear wall, with her hands over her face. The slide had missed her by only a few feet.

She looked up at Smitty’s cry, gray eyes wild.

“Borg!” she cried. “It was Borg. I saw him, at the entrance. He set off one of those little bombs and trapped us in here.”

“So — the gang got the jump on us!” said Smitty, hard-eyed. “We weren’t as smart — or as fast — as we thought we were. Chief! Oh, chief!”

MacMurdie stumbled from the tunnel he had been exploring, followed within a few seconds by Chandler. They were white-faced and shaken.

Dick Benson did not come from his tunnel.

“Where’s the chief?” said MacMurdie, anxiety for his boss overshadowing fear for himself. “Why doesn’t he come out of there?”

They watched the tunnel, breathlessly. There was no sound from within, no sight of the white, dead countenance, and the icily flaming pale eyes.

“We’d better go down—”

They hurried down Benson’s tunnel — all of them, with Nellie’s hand clasped in Smitty’s great paw to keep her from tripping. They got to the black death of the river. And there was no sign of Benson.

“He must have… fallen in,” faltered Nellie, swaying.

“The chief?” said Smitty. “Not him! He could walk a tightrope over Vesuvius and not fall.”

“There’s no place else he could be,” said MacMurdie, frosty-blue eyes filled with a dreadful certainty.

Chandler pointed to the brink of the twenty-foot drop down to the water. There, the outline of the place where the overhanging ledge had been could be plainly seen.

“A stone slab collapsed under him,” said Chandler. “A mountain goat would fall, if the ledge he stood on fell under him.”

There was a vast and horrible silence, while the wind fanned up from the narrow chasm, stirred by the noiseless rush of the water.

Smitty, voice strained and hoarse, said:

“Maybe we can get out ourselves. Better to try than just stand here looking into that river.”

“There’s no way out of here,” said Chandler, eyeing the blank wall across the deep crack in the rock. “And my tunnel ended in a little tomb, with solid walls. No way out there.”

“The one I was in just stopped,” said Smitty.

MacMurdie, peering at the river with suffering blue eyes under sandy ropes of eyebrows, shrugged a little.

“I didn’t get to the end of mine. There might be a way out there. I couldn’t tell.”

“Then we’ll go down that one,” Smitty said. “Take it slow, everybody. Keep close together. And hang onto your flashlights!”

They went back to the central chamber, which had become a tomb with the rock seal over its mouth. They went down the tunnel MacMurdie had explored a little way.

Long before that tunnel ended, they would have gone back — if there had been any hope to go back to. The underground tunnel twisted and turned until they were hopelessly lost. Every few yards, some other tunnel laced into it. Methodically they explored each of these, finding an end after a dozen or a hundred steps. Many of them became natural fissures instead of artificial tunnels, after a few feet. The ground here was honeycombed with caves and runways.

“We’ll never get out!” cried Nellie.

“Maybe a little farther on,” said MacMurdie. As usual, when things really looked desperate, the dour Scot was optimistic. When things were normal he gloomily predicted disaster; when they looked impossible, he grew almost cheerful.

“We’ll be comin’ to a way out—” he said. And then he stopped talking. And the rest stopped walking. They were at the end of the parent tunnel — their last hope. And that end was black.

They looked at each other, ghostly in the fading light of the flashlights. Then, as the illumination faded a little more, Chandler cried out.

“At the very end there! Where the tunnel goes to a blunt point! Look!”

They all stared, and Nellie’s gasp was audible.

They could see a tiny scrap of light there; a postage-stamp-sized square of daylight. They scrambled forward.

There had been blank rock wall at the end of this tunnel. The wall of some low cliff. But, ages past, a tree had got its roots in crevices near the tunnel. Roots had swelled through the years, chipping off rock slabs, till now there was an opening.

But the opening was plugged by the tree itself, a hardwood, over a foot in diameter, with a mass of tangled roots filling the end of the tunnel.

Chandler’s shoulders drooped. His voice was quiet but resigned as he said:

“We’re still stuck. We can’t bore up through the heart of that tree with nothing but penknives. And to remove the tree we’d need dynamite.”

Mac turned his frosty-blue eyes on Smitty’s massive bulk.

“We’ve got dynamite,” he assured the engineer. “Only it walks on two legs and calls itself Smitty. Whoosh! Ye can tumble that thing, can’t ye, Smitty? The trunk of it must slant out of balance on the other side, growin’ out of a wall as it does.”

Smitty was looking thoughtfully at the roots.

“Dig under ’em so I can crawl in there, and we’ll see,” he said doubtfully.

Working with their hands, they hollowed under the ball of tree roots. There was earth as well as rock, which made it possible. Then Smitty writhed under the base of the tree, and worked his body upward against the roots till he was on hands and knees.

“It’s impossible!” said Chandler, staring. “A man can’t tip an eighteen-inch tree over!”

“Catch hold of the big roots that stick out,” said Smitty, “and heave when I do.”

Chandler and MacMurdie grasped roots.

“Now!” said Smitty, and heaved.

They could hear his tendons cracking with the effort. Mac and Chandler were doing a little cracking, too. The tree quivered, but that was all.

“Again!” grunted Smitty, arching his vast back.

The tree swayed a bit.

“Again, in rhythm.”

They began to rock it — lifting, relaxing when the tree outside settled back, lifting again. With each lift, Smitty heaved explosively, putting back and legs and arms into it, expending twice the power of the other two men put together.

“I tell you it’s impossible—” panted Chandler.

There was a crack, a creaking sound, a moan as if the tree were a thing alive. Then the roots which stuck into the end of the tunnel slowly pulled themselves out as the bole of the tree tilted. There was a moment when the whole leaning bulk seemed to hang frozen, then it went on its way with a crackling of breaking roots and a final crash. And a hole was torn where the tree base had been that was almost big enough to walk through.

“We did it!” yelled Mac to the panting giant. “Smitty — Nellie — we are free—”

He stopped as they stared into light and freedom. They were near the low rock table on which the plane had been. Had been! It wasn’t there any more!

There was a shallow crater in the rock. All around this was fragments of branches and bits of plane. The men with Borg had planted one of the peanut bombs under the transport ship and rained it in bits from the heavens.

“Sure, we’re free,” said Chandler heavily. “But Benson is gone, and the plane is smashed, so we’re marooned here, and we have no food or supplies.”

“The skurlies!” MacMurdie muttered, bony fists clenching. “If I ever get my hands on them—”

“We won’t, if they can get to us first,” said Smitty. “We’ve got to hole in. And not in any tunnel or cave where the entrance can be sealed to bottle us up! We’d better build a barricade in the open. Logs. That’s the ticket. We’ll all scatter into the jungle and bring logs. There. Where the big tree stands. There must be water near it, or it wouldn’t tower so high above the rest. We’ll build a log wall around that tree, and see what comes. We’ve got an automatic apiece and a few extra clips. We’re not done yet.”

They started getting logs. Chandler went farthest afield. And then they heard his cry.

“Help! They’ve got me—”

The cry came from near the base of the ridge. Smitty and Mac dropped their logs and ran toward the spot. Nellie, behind a tree, was aiming her automatic toward the place — but wasn’t seeing anything to shoot at.

Smitty and Mac got four yards — and dropped. From the tangled greenery ahead of them had sounded something that was grimly familiar. The deadly riveter’s song of a machine gun.

Lead sprayed over and around them, snipping leaves from the trees, cutting small branches. From a lot farther off they heard Chandler cry out again. Then they heard him no more.

Smitty and Mac, grim-lipped, snaked their way back toward the huge hardwood tree they’d selected as a base. Nellie, with the woodcraft of a man, after her experience on expeditions with her father, slid through the thick growth and joined them there. With the solid bole between them and that pounding tattoo, they were safe even from a machine gun.

They looked narrow-eyed at each other.

“The chief gone. Chandler gone!” Smitty said. “It doesn’t look too hot for the rest of us.”

“Whoosh, mon!” said Mac, with his cockeyed cheerfulness in the face of the impossible. “We’ll get ’em yet!”

From the side, another machine gun opened up on them. It crept farther around, searching for them behind the bole. And then from the opposite side a third machine gun opened up.

“What’s after us — the whole Mexican army?” Smitty said, staring.

Nellie looked upward. The huge tree presented a thick globe of greenery above them. Impenetrable greenery.

“I think we can climb to the lower branches before they really see us,” she said. “Up there, they couldn’t get a line on us for quite a while.”

Something like a small pineapple crashed to the ground not far from them. It burst with a dull plop, and greenish vapor came from it.

“Gas!” exclaimed the Scotchman. “Now, where would the skurlies get all this stuff?”

The gas bomb decided them. Smitty, with his great height and reach, got his hands over the lowest branch and swarmed up to it. Mac lifted Nellie to him. He hauled her up one-handed, as if she had been a feather. Mac followed. They climbed forty feet, and then stopped.

The machine guns were drumming out lead — but still around the base of the tree. Two more gas bombs had released their deadly load, but the phosgene wasn’t rising to anywhere near their height.

They were out of sight up there, and safe for at least a little while.

But they didn’t dare come down, and they couldn’t stay up there forever.