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.
CHAPTER XVII
An “Indian” Makes A Find
In the pitch darkness of that underground river, Benson was carried at least a dozen yards before he came up to the surface again. When he did rise at last, with powerful strokes, he bleakly expected that there would be no surface to rise to — that the water would fill entirely the underground natural tunnel through which it silently raced.
His life was saved, though he did not realize it for a while, by just one thing — it was the dry season, and the subterranean river was not swollen to capacity.
He came up to free air, and when he reached up with his arms he felt about a two-foot space over his head.
Treading water, he let himself be borne swiftly along in an upright position. He kept his arms stretched up. Now and then the roof of the tunnel raised till he felt nothing. Now and then it narrowed till he had to duck under water so that his head could clear it.
As he moved, chill things touched his legs, coiled around them with slimy and eyeless tenacity till he could kick them loose.
The current suddenly slowed, showing that, ahead, the river bed was much wider. At first, Benson took the slowing as a good sign. But in a moment it became clear that it was a bad one. The roof over him rapidly dipped down, not in any short intervals, but inexorably and endlessly.
He had six inches clear, then four, then no more than two. But now the current was slow enough so that he could stay his forward rush with his hands. He held himself motionless for a moment, with just the tip of his nose between water and roof, breathing in air.
The pitch blackness seemed mysteriously to have lifted just a little. You could feel the faint relief of it more than actually see it. Taking a deep breath, Benson dipped beneath the surface to try to locate it.
Ahead, an unguessable distance, there was a vague light spot. A very small spot, in the top of the watery tunnel. Benson raised again, with his nose out for air.
He could hang on there, alive, for several hours. But there was no hope in the end. He could go forward toward the light with a fractional chance of getting to upper air again. Ninety-nine chances of drowning, to one of escape.
The bleak, colorless eyes hardly changed expression. Benson had been up against hundred-to-one odds many times, and hadn’t hesitated. He didn’t hesitate now. He drew as deep a breath as his capacious lungs would hold, ducked down and began sliding through black water toward the faint patch.