Joe Keogh, when the uproar broke upon the quiet night, started to rush for the ladder to get back up into the house, but then remembered that the trapdoor should still be locked or latched on the inside. Slowly he retreated to his original position, watching and listening.
Bill stood for a long moment indecisive, half in and half out of moonlight now, on the verge of charging back up to the house, in the name of doing something. But then the thought of the locked trapdoor passed through Bill's mind as it had through Joe's. Following it was the sudden suspicion that all this noise might be meant as a distraction, to draw him away from the place where he had been posted.
But before this state of indecision had endured for more than a second or two, Bill's attention was drawn from the house, by the sight of first one strange figure and then another, striding downhill as if they had just come from Tyrrell's old dwelling. Both figures were moving so swiftly and unexpectedly that both were past Bill before he could react in any purposeful way.
A moment later Bill, reacting instinctively, had started in pursuit. Pulling out his flashlight, he turned it on, and in the same instant cried out for the two to halt. His shout had no visible effect.
Even in the excitement of the moment it struck him as unsettling that his quarry, the figures of someone—or something—at least generally, vaguely human—were eerily not really running, but rather striding away from him, moving at the speed of runners, gliding downhill, departing untouched into the invisible depths of the Canyon.
They were escaping, scot-free, after making a mockery of Bill's and his colleagues' efforts to protect their client.
Worse than defeat was insult. There was something indefinably daunting about the figures Bill had glimpsed—about that first one in particular—but he was a brave young man and did not hesitate, at least not more than momentarily, to pursue.
His flashlight now failed to reveal anything of the foremost figure that fled from him down the slope—that appeared to have already vanished—but the beam afforded him one fairly clear look at the rearmost, who had paused momentarily. In Bill's sight this took the form of a man, a total stranger as far as he could tell—gray-haired, and dressed in gray work clothing. Bill yelled at this man to halt.
The gray-haired man paid not the least attention, but strode on, resuming his effortless Olympic pace.
Bill, running now at something like full speed, started to give chase in earnest.
Joe Keogh had been able to catch only a fleeting glimpse of the same two figures. To him they were extremely ominous, but in the next moment he saw something that scared him more—Bill, plunging heedlessly down the trail after them.
Joe yelled for Bill to stop.
If Bill heard Joe's command, he paid no more attention to it than Bill's quarry had to his.
Joe, drawing in breath to yell again, started in full-speed pursuit also.
But before he could shout Bill's name a second time, or run more than a few yards, Joe tripped and stumbled on the rough and unfamiliar trail. A numbing shock shot through his ankle, sudden forewarning of agony about to come. Joe fell, hardly aware of the impact of rock and dirt beneath his hands, scraping palms and fingers painfully on tough brush and unyielding rock.
Heedlessly wasting what little breath he still retained on useless oaths, Joe struggled to his feet and tried to resume his run. One attempted step on his right leg was all he needed to convince him that he was through running for the night. He collapsed again, with a groan of pain.
Meanwhile John Southerland, dutifully holding his assigned post at the front of the house, heard some disturbance inside, or, as he thought, at the rear. There was a crash of glass and other violent noise, accompanied by yells in several voices.
John crouched slightly, alternating his attention between the house and the approaches to it, from which the last tourist had disappeared more than an hour ago. He refused to let himself be drawn away from his post. The disturbance was quite possibly a planned distraction.
Gradually Maria became aware that Gerald Brainard, trembling and muttering, carrying a heavy revolver in hand, was standing beside her chair, in the room next to where old Sarah was still sitting upright in the bed.
"They're gone now. It's all over," said Brainard in a husky voice. Maria thought that he looked curiously relieved.
Maria's radio was buzzing on the little table beside her chair, and she groped to answer it.
Outside, Joe, sitting helplessly on the ground, was using his own radio to call for help.
John Southerland, getting the call, at last did leave his post, moving decisively. With flashlight in hand he went running around the house and downhill to the place from which Joe was calling for help.
John relaxed somewhat when the beam of his flashlight showed him his brother-in-law sitting on a rock, swearing too loudly for a man with a mortal injury.
"Help me up, goddam it!"
"Where you hurt?"
"My ankle."
John grabbed the older man under the arms and hoisted. "Where's Bill?" he asked, looking around.
"Went chasing off downhill like a damn fool." Joe balanced on one foot, leaning half his weight on John's shoulder. "After those… I tried to stop him—no, don't you go running after him."
"He went chasing after…?" John didn't complete the question; he could already read the answer in Joe's frightened eyes.
For the next couple of minutes they both tried, with no success, to get Bill on the radio.
"Help me back to the house," Joe growled at last. "What's going on in there?"
"I haven't looked. Maria sounded like she had things under control—still there, Maria?"
"Still here," her voice responded after a moment. "If you guys are coming in, I'll open the trapdoor."
Getting the injured man up the ladder was difficult, but with Maria tugging from above and John pushing from below the task proved not impossible. Joe's adrenaline was up, and his arms were strong enough to hoist his weight repeatedly.
Brainard and Sarah came to meet the investigators in the lowest level of the house.
Of those present, no one but Joe had been hurt.
"Did I hear shots?" he demanded.
No one answered that directly.
"I thought I heard one," said Maria. "And Mr. Brainard here was carrying a pistol. Also there's a small hole in one of the windows."
"All right, we'll deal with that later." For a moment Joe stared at Brainard, who looked back numbly. "Maria, try again to get Bill on the radio. John, get me up the stairway to the main floor, can you?"
While John was helping the boss upstairs, Maria tried her radio. "This is the house," she kept saying. "Bill, is that you? Come in."
Only noise responded.
Joe, hobbling now through the middle level of the house, leaning on furniture, muttered something to the effect that the radios were expensive junk.
"They always worked great before," John commented.
And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Bill's voice was coming clearly through the little unit in Maria's hand. Some of the words were unclear, half-drowned in noise, but the burden of Bill's message seemed to be that he had managed to get himself lost, or at least bewildered; he was going to have to sit tight until daylight.
Joe, at the head of a stairway, looking down at Maria at the foot, let out a sigh of relief. He nodded at her.
"Sit tight, then," she told Bill. "Anything you need?" Bill did not answer. Joe shook his head and muttered.
Maria was left with the puzzling feeling that she had fainted during the excitement; but no, she couldn't have done that. She had been sleeping when it started, that was it. Noise had awakened her, and lights at the windows, and then… Brainard, standing over her with gun in hand.