Benson turned questioningly to the Indian, who translated the command to keep out of camp. Benson shrugged, and squatted with a resigned air where he was.
Borg went hurriedly back toward the gang’s jungle headquarters. Benson gave him five minutes, then crept after him.
He didn’t get into camp; there was a small clearing that he couldn’t cross unseen. But if he couldn’t see what went on there, he could hear from his ambush.
He heard Borg say: “Now, honest, I didn’t try to cross you. How’d I know where you were?”
Then another voice, crisp, cold, commanding, spoke up. It was not the voice of any of Borg’s gang. It was, at last the real leader of this murderous crew; the man who had lurked in the background all along and used Borg and his gang merely as tools of his own superior intelligence and ruthlessness.
“All right. Forget it,” this voice said. “We’ll take it up later. What is important is that I’ve got a way to smash that crowd after us in one stroke. With one blow I can kill everything on the other side of that ridge. And I’m going to do it. In half an hour our troubles will be over.”
“Look,” said Borg, “three of these coffee-bean natives we’ve got working for us are over there, too. They’re holding them steady with the machine guns. If you do what you say — however the hell you expect to do it, I don’t know — you’ll knock off those three, too.”
There was a little pause. Then the cold voice said:
“So what? Do you really care?”
“Well, no,” mumbled Borg. “I guess they got it coming.”
“Then shut up about it.”
“Yeah, but look. How about the gold? If we don’t get that last plate they got, to show us where the stuff’s hidden—”
“We can find it without it. Hang tight, and in a few minutes you’ll see how a lot of men can die!”
CHAPTER XIX
The Avenger Plans
It was all Nellie could do to keep from screaming as she saw what the man at the base of the shaft was doing. For the purpose was only too clear. Too terribly clear!
A deep fissure dividing the ridge. A great rock shaft along the fissure, weighing hundreds of tons. Explosives around the base of the shaft!
A shattering explosion, and the fall of that great weight, would almost certainly send that whole side of the ledge, hundreds of thousands of tons of stone, avalanching down on Smitty and Mac. The slide would reach the great tree, sweep it down like a twig, cover it, and go on for another hundred yards or more. They were doomed — everything on that side of the ledge was doomed, if those explosives went off.
Calmly, coldly, the man was coming toward Nellie, dropping a few of the peanut bombs lightly down the fissure, too, just to make sure. They’d be exploded with the blast of the shells around the rock shaft.
He got nearer, lifted his head a little, and for the first time Nellie saw his face in the late afternoon sun. And then she didn’t entirely manage to keep back her exclamation.
The man was Olin Chandler, “carried off” a while ago into the jungle by their enemies!
Chandler heard the girl’s repressed gasp, up there in the silence. He crouched, then began racing toward the bush behind which she was hiding. He had his gun out.
Nellie shot at him. She saw the peak of his coat at the shoulder split a little. He began zigzagging toward her. She shot again, and missed.
She felt like a person in a nightmare. If she didn’t stop this man, there would be an avalanche of rock like an earthquake, and Smitty and Mac would die under tons of stone. Everything rested on her.
Chandler began shooting, now. At every other step he sent a slug tearing through the bush at the person he could not see. He didn’t hit with any of them, but he kept Nellie down where she could not shoot back. And then he was around and on her.
His savage eyes raked her with a little surprise, which was succeeded by murderous fury. He didn’t slow up at all — leaped straight toward her, a hundred and eighty pounds against her fragile-looking hundred and five.
Nellie seemed to dissolve and reappear a foot to the left. She whirled with his rush, hands grasping his outstretched right arm and abruptly letting go again. Chandler smashed on for twenty feet like something out of a slingshot, and fell to the ground.
He was up and back at her like a cat.
Nellie had dropped her gun. She scrambled for it, and couldn’t get it in time. Chandler’s gun crashed down for her head. She ducked, got a glancing blow, and caught at his ankles, dazed with pain.
He fell, but not hard enough to stun him. He got to his knees and struck with the gun barrel again. This time Nellie felt the world go black, though again she had managed to elude the full force of the blow. Only the silky thickness of her hair saved her life.
She fell, and felt herself being dragged over the rocky ledge-top. She was dumped like an empty sack, and a moment later managed to open her eyes.
She had been left midway between the deadly fissure and the edge of the ridge, on the side doomed to split away from the other two-thirds and come crashing down.
Chandler was off at quite a little distance. Dazedly, she saw him hurrying toward a stunted tree, well away from the rock shaft and on the safe side of the ledge. He had a rifle in his hands now.
Her numbed brain was struggling with the meaning of his move, knowing what it portended and yet not able to put it into a clear picture.
She cried out a little, and struggled to move. A gun — explosives at the base of the great shaft — a shot—
Chandler meant to explode the terrible little bombs with a bullet from a safe distance.
He got to the tree. There was a fork in it. He placed the rifle in the fork, for a positive gun-rest. He sighted toward the statue.
Nellie was screaming, without quite being aware of it. She heard her voice keening out, and hardly knew it was hers. Like a crippled thing, she was crawling toward the fissure, unable to stand up, going on hands and knees. And Chandler was sighting long and expertly at several of the little bombs in an exposed heap at the base of the shaft. Even with a gun-rest, it was a difficult shot from the distance he had taken for safety.
Screaming, crawling, Nellie urged her dazed body toward the fissure, to cross it and be on the safe side when the bullet spanged into the little bombs. Chandler flicked a glance at her, saw that she was no menace, and turned back to his long, sure aim.
Nellie was near the fissure. She’d never make it! Yes, she might—
A hand caught her arm and pulled her violently back. She screamed again, and fought the grasp that was robbing her of her fight for life. The hand simply pulled her back some more, farther onto the strip of ledge that was to crash into grinding fragments with the pull of a trigger.
She turned to beat the force preventing her from reaching the fissure.
She got an instant’s glimpse of a red-brown native in tattered pants and cotton jacket — but a native from whose dark features blazed pale, deadly eyes, and whose face had no more expression than a mask of dark clay.
Those icily flaring, colorless eyes — the chief!
She never heard the shot. It was instantly engulfed in a blast that seemed to rock all that part of Mexico. The ground rolled and heaved under them. The roar of the explosion seemed to prolong itself on and on, mingled with the grating sounds made by rock fragments as big as five-story buildings grinding together.
Herself and this “Indian” with Benson’s eyes — riding the falling crest of the ridge strip for a few seconds — to be ground to bits in the slide that would also bury Mac and Smitty as bits of pulp—
But somehow Nellie didn’t feel herself falling. The solid rock beneath her was still doing a devil’s dance. The incredible roar of falling rock, like the thunder of a dozen tidal waves rolled into one, was going on and on.”