Presently, followed by the two colonists who dared not let him for a moment out of their sight, he reached the brow of the cañon. His hand flash-lamp showed him the rough path to the terrace.
With fast-beating heart he ran down it, unmindful of the unprotected edge or the sheer drop to the rocks of New Hope River, far below.
Bremilu and Zangamon, seeing perfectly in the gloom, hurried close behind, with words of awe, wonder and admiration in their own tongue.
“Beta! Oh, Beatrice! Home again!” Stern shouted triumphantly. “Where are you, Beta? Come! I'm home again!”
Quickly he scrambled along the broken terrace, stumbling in his haste over loose rocks and débris. Now he had reached the turn. The fire was in sight.
“Beta!” again he hailed. “O-hé! Beatrice!”
Still no answer, nor any sign from her. As he came to the fire he noted, despite his strong emotions, that it had for the most part burned down to glowing embers.
Only one or two resinous knots still flamed. It could not have been replenished for some time, perhaps two hours or more.
Again, his quick eye caught the fact that cinders, ashes and half-burned sticks lay scattered about in strange disorder.
“Why, Beatrice never makes a fire like that!” the thought pierced through his mind.
And--though as yet on no very definite grounds--a quick prescience of catastrophe battered at his heart.
“What's this?”
Something lying on the rock-ledge, near the fire, caught his eye. He snatched it up.
“What--what can this mean?”
The colonists stood, frightened and confused, peering at him in the dark. His face, in the ruddy fire-glow, as he studied the thing he now held in his hand, must have been very terrible.
“Cloth! Torn! But--but then--”
He flung from him the bit of the girl's cloak which, ripped and shredded as though by a powerful hand, cried disaster.
“Beatrice!” he shouted. “Where are you? Beatrice!”
To the doorway in the cliff he ran, shaken and trembling.
The stone had been pushed away; it lay inside the cave. Ominously the black entrance seemed staring at him in the dull gleam of the firelight.
On hands and knees he fell, and hastily crawled through. As he went, he flashed his lamp here, there, everywhere.
“Beatrice! Beatrice!”
No answer.
In the far corner still flickered some remainder of the cooking-fire. But there, too, ashes and half-burned sticks lay scattered all about.
To the bed he ran. It was empty and cold.
“Beatrice! Oh, my God!”
A glint of something metallic on the floor drew his bewildered, terror-smitten gaze.
He sprang, seized the object, and for a moment stood staring, while all about him the very universe seemed thundering and crashing down.
The object in his hand was the girl's gun. One cartridge, and only one, had been exploded.
The barrel had been twisted almost off, as though by the wrenching clutch of a hand inhuman in its ghastly power.
On the stock, distinctly nicked into the hard rubber as Stern held the flash-lamp to it, were the unmistakable imprints of teeth.
With a groan, Allan started backward. The revolver fell with a clatter to the cave floor.
His foot slid in something wet, something sticky.
“Blood!” he gasped.
Half-crazed, he reeled toward the door.
The flash-lamp in his hand flung its white brush of radiance along the wall.
With a chattering cry he recoiled.
There, roughly yet unmistakably imprinted on the white limestone surface, he saw the print, in crimson, of a huge, a horrible, a brutally distorted hand.
CHAPTER XIV. ON THE TRAIL OF THE MONSTER
Stern's cry of horror as he scrambled from the ravaged, desecrated cave, and the ghastly horror of his face, seen by the firelight, brought Zangamon and Bremilu to him, in terror.
“Master! Master! What--”
“My God! The girl--she's gone!” he stammered, leaning against the cliff in mortal anguish.
“Gone, master? Where?”
“Gone! Dead, perhaps! Find her for me! Find her! You can see--in the dark! I--I am as though blind! Quick, on the trail!”
“But tell us--”
“Something has taken her! Some savage thing! Some wild man! Even now he may be killing her! Quick--after them!”
Bremilu stood staring for a moment, unable to grasp this catastrophe on the very moment of arrival. But Zangamon, of swifter wit, had already fallen on his knees, there by the mouth of the cave, and now--seeing clearly by the dim light which more than sufficed for him--was studying the traces of the struggle.
Stern, meanwhile, clutching his head between both hands, dumb-mad with agony, was choking with dry sobs.
“Master! See!”
Zangamon held up a piece of splintered wood, with the bark deeply scarred by teeth.
Stern snatched it.
“Part of the pole I gave her to brace the rock with,” he realized. “Even that was of no avail.”
“Master--this way they went!”
Zangamon pointed up along the rock-terrace. Stern's eyes could distinguish no slightest trace on the stone, but the Merucaan spoke with certainty. He added:
“There was fighting, all the way along here, master. And then, here, the girl was dragged.”
Stern stumbled blindly after him as he led the way.
“There was fighting here? She struggled?”
“Yes, master.”
“Thank God! She was alive here, anyhow! She wasn't killed in the cave. Maybe, in the open, she might--”
“Now there is no more fighting, master. The wild thing carried her here.”
He pointed at the rock. Stern, trembling and very sick, flashed his electric-lamp upon it. With eyes of dread and horror he looked for blood-stains.
What? A drop! With a dull, shuddering groan, he pressed forward again.
Out he jerked his pistol and fired, straight up, their prearranged signaclass="underline" One shot, then a pause, then two. Some bare possibility existed and that she still might live and hear and know that rescue came--if it could come before it were eternally too late!
“On, on!” cried Allan. “Go on, Zangamon! Quick! Lead me on the trail!”
The Merucaan, now aided by Bremilu, who had recovered his wits, scouted ahead like a blood-hound on the spoor of a fugitive. One gripped his stone ax, the other a javelin.
Bent half double, scrutinizing in the dark the stony path which Allan followed behind them only by the aid of his flash, they proceeded cautiously up toward the brow of the cliff again.
But ere they reached the top they branched off onto another lateral path, still rougher and more tortuous, that led along the breast of the cañon.
“This way, master. It was here, most surely, the thing carried her.”
“What kind of marks? Do you see signs of claws?”
“Claws? What are claws?”
“Sharp, long nails, like our nails, only much larger and longer. Do you see any such marks?”
Zangamon paused a second to peer.
“I seem to see marks as of hands, master, but--”
“No matter! On! We must find her! Quick--lead the way!”
Five minutes of agonizing suspense for Allan brought him, still following the guides, without whom all would have been utterly lost, to a kind of thickly wooded dell that descended sharply to the edge of the cañon. Into this the trail led.
Even he himself could now here and there make out, by the aid of his light, a broken twig, trampled ferns and down-crushed grass. Once he distinguished a blood-stain on a limb--fresh blood, not coagulated. A groan burst from between his chattering teeth.