The Border Boys on the Trail

He was pointing downward excitedly. Almost at his feet was a mildewed iron ring. As the light died out, he grasped it.

"Never mind the darkness, now; I've got it!" he cried exultingly.

"Pull it up," urged Ralph, all else forgotten in the mystic spell of hidden treasure.

"Yes, pull," urged Walt.

"I – ugh – ugh!" grunted the professor, putting all his strength into it, but the ring never budged an inch.

"Here, give me a hand, boys!" he cried.

"How are we to find you?" asked Ralph.

"Here, extend your hands. Ah, that's it," went on the scientist, seizing hold of the boys' wrists and guiding them down to the ring.

"Now, all together," he said; "pull!"

With all their strength the three adventurers tugged with a mighty heave at the iron. At first it seemed that it was going to prove obdurate even to their combined efforts, but continued tugging resulted in a slight quiver of whatever the iron ring was fastened to.

"Now, once more – he-a-ve!"

There was a sudden give on the part of the iron ring, and its foundation gave way with a rush.

A strange, pungent odor filled the air!

"I – I – I'm choking," gasped Walt, gripping his collar with both hands and tearing it open, to relieve the terrible congestion that had suddenly seized upon his throat.

"Run, boys; run for your lives!" shouted the professor. "There's something deadly in there!"

They needed no second invitation. Forward they plunged, gasping and choking, in the grip of the unseen, destructive agent they had liberated.

The professor, as he sprang forward, felt his foot slip, and realized that he was falling backward. As he fell into what he knew must be the pit they had opened, and from which the noxious fumes were pouring, he grasped at something – it was Walt's leg.

"Hey, leggo my leg!" howled the red-headed youth, half-crazy with fear. To his excited imagination, it seemed that in the darkness some pulling arm had reached up from the pit and seized him.

"Walt! Walt!" gasped the professor. "Save me!"

The boy, in agony as he was from the horrible gases, pluckily reached round and felt about. Presently he felt the professor's bony hand grip his. A second later, the scientist had been hauled out of danger. But the suffocating fumes still filled the passage. They were choking, blinding and killing the adventurers.

"Forward, forward! It's our only chance!" cried the professor.

Suddenly he felt Walt, who was just ahead of him in the panic-stricken flight, collapse. Seizing the fainting boy in his arms, the professor bravely struggled on. In the meantime Ralph had hastened on ahead, and knew nothing of what had occurred behind him.

Rapidly he ran from the unseen peril, covering the ground swiftly. Stumbling blindly forward, he all at once felt the air grow fresh and sweet, and at the same time a sort of glow penetrated the stygian darkness of the tunnel.

The boy glanced upward and gave a cry of delight. Above him, at the mouth of a circular shaft, he saw the kindly stars blinking. Never had the sight of the sky looked so sweet to him. But even as he was congratulating himself, he looked about for his companions.

They were not there!

"Hullo, Walt – professor! Hurry," he called back into the blackness and the foul danger he had left behind him.

To his dismay, his voice echoed hollowly upon the rocks, and went booming mysteriously down the tunnel. But human reply to his call, there was none.

With a sinking heart, Ralph realized in an instant what had happened. The professor and his companion had been overcome, by whatever it was that had emanated from the trapdoor in the tunnel.

A sort of panic seized on the boy.

He shouted and shouted, again and again, regardless of his voice being heard above. But only the mockery of the echo to his frightened cries came back to him.

It is no disparagement to Ralph to say that it required some effort on his part to nerve himself for what he did then. Summoning every ounce of resolution in his body, he threw himself on his hands and knees, with a vague recollection of having heard somewhere, that deadly gases were less deadly near to the ground.

Thus extended, the Eastern boy, with a beating heart and a dread sense of disaster oppressing him, crawled back into the danger-filled darkness from which he had just emerged.

As he proceeded, the air grew more and more unbearable. His skin seemed to be on fire, and his eyes were filled with an aching, burning, smart that was maddening. But the boy kept repeating over and over to himself the words he had uttered as he plunged back over the path of danger.

"I must get them out. I must get them out!"

In the pitchy darkness, with mind and body burning, he painfully wriggled on.

"I can't keep this up much longer," was his thought; "where are they, oh, where are they?"

Suddenly he bumped into something soft. It was a human body.

"Professor!" gasped the boy in a voice which he knew must be his own, but which sounded strangely like that of another person.

A faint groan answered him.

"You must come with me. I must get you out. I must get you out," gasped Ralph. He seized the other's clothes and made a brave effort to drag him forward. But as he did so, everything seemed to race round and round in his head in a mad whirligig, and the boy collapsed in a senseless heap beside the two he had come to save.

CHAPTER XIX.

JIM HICKS, PROSPECTOR

The sharp eyes of Coyote Pete were not long in discovering the cause of the startling interruption to the adulation of Maud.

Through a clump of brush some distance above the trail, a strange, wild face was peering at them. Yet, despite its tangle of beard, and the battered hat which crowned its tangled locks, the countenance was a kindly one, and there was friendliness in its blue eyes. Above all, it was the face of an American. Pete, and Jack, too, for that matter, would have thrown themselves rejoicingly on the neck of the most disreputable of their countrymen, if they had happened to meet him at that moment.

"Traveling?" inquired the stranger, coming out from his concealment and disclosing a well-knit body dressed in plainsman's garb. The butt of a revolver glinted suggestively on his left thigh.

"Reckon so," rejoined Pete.

"Whar frum?"

"South."

"Whar to?"

"North."