The Island Stallion (8 page)

Steve continued thinking about the horse on the cliff as he rose and followed Pitch down the tunnel. A horse needed grazing land, so surely these tunnels had to lead to the surface. Surely there had to be more than just these passages running through the yellow
rock. A horse couldn’t live underground. But this tunnel through which they were traveling continued to go ever downward. Was it the wrong tunnel? Should they have taken one of the others? Of all the many tunnels was there only one that led to the surface? Were they to spend days groping around behind the beam of their flashlight, as they were doing now? Were they—

Pitch came to a sudden stop and Steve bumped into him. “What is it, Pitch?” And although Steve’s voice was little more than an anxious whisper, it echoed loudly through the tunnel.

Without saying a word, Pitch turned the beam of light to the right. Steve fully expected to see another tunnel, but instead he saw a high natural cleavage in the stone. Then Pitch flashed the light inside over a long rectangular room with a jagged ceiling all of six feet high. They entered, straightening their backs and glorying in the feeling of being able to stand upright again.

Pitch slowly turned the flashlight over the walls and ceiling. They saw a ventilation shaft in the middle of the chamber. Then Pitch brought the light down a little lower. There, in front of their eyes, was a long table of heavy wood!

Running forward, Pitch stood before the table. The flashlight’s beam moved over a surface heavily laden with a fine gray dust.

“What’s that behind the table?” Steve asked suddenly.

Pitch turned the flashlight on the object on the floor, and they both saw the overturned chair. But their eyes left it for the carved crest and the lettering upon the wall behind it.

They rounded the table quickly, Pitch holding the flashlight close to the wall. Half obliterated with age, but still faintly visible, was the outline of a scroll, in the center of which they made out the figure of a lion standing upon his hind legs and holding a small bird clutched between his paws.

“A coat of arms,” Pitch said huskily.

The lettering beneath the crest was in Spanish and only the top two lines could be made out:

His voice still heavy with emotion, Pitch translated: “In the year 1669. Here Captain …” He turned to Steve. “That’s the year the Spaniards were driven from Antago by the pirates,” he said quickly. “Steve! This proves I’m right! This is a fort to which the Spaniards fled after leaving Antago!”

In his excitement Pitch had directed the flashlight’s beam from the wall to the opposite side of the room, and there they saw another great split in the wall, leading to a chamber beyond. “Look, Steve!” Pitch shouted. “Another room!”

Pitch ran around the table toward the doorway. He was nearing the center of the room when suddenly there was the sharp clanking of metal against stone. Steve caught a glimpse of the shovel as Pitch’s foot sent it wildly across the room. Then Pitch fell, and the flashlight went out to the sound of splintering glass. Stumbling against the table in the darkness, Steve groped his way forward, trying to find Pitch.

In the darkness, Steve could make out the dim square of light beneath the ventilation shaft. Pitch’s legs were within this patch of light, but the rest of his body was enveloped in the darkness of the chamber.

As Steve reached him, Pitch was drawing one leg up to a kneeling position.

“Pitch! Are you all right?”

There was a groan more of disgust than agony as Pitch said, “Got the wind knocked out of me. But the flashlight, Steve! Where is it? Is it broken?”

They found it by groping in the dark, running their frantic hands across the cold, smooth stone. They took one look at it in the dim light of the shaft and knew immediately that it was hopeless to think it would ever work again. The end had been driven hard against the stone; there was no lens, no bulb, nothing but a battered, twisted piece of metal.

“Maybe it’ll work, Pitch. We’ve got other bulbs. We can try.”

Shaking his head, Pitch muttered, “Sure we’ve got more bulbs. More batteries, too. But not another flashlight. We haven’t a chance.”

Steve was making his way toward where they’d left the packs when he heard Pitch mutter angrily, almost to himself, “What a numbskull I am! What a stupid fool not to have brought another flashlight along!”

After finding the packs, Steve pulled them across toward Pitch. “You didn’t know we were going to go through this,” he said. “I should have thought of another flashlight too. It’s my fault as much as yours.”

They found they couldn’t even get the bulbs into the wrenched socket.

Looking into the darkness, Pitch said, “A nice mess. Luckily, we have plenty of matches and we shouldn’t have too much trouble getting back—if we’re careful.”

“Back,” slowly repeated Steve. “Yes, I guess we do have to go back.”

“There’s no other choice,” Pitch said. “We could roam through these tunnels for a long time, I’m afraid, without finding our way to whatever it is that’s at the end of them. If there is an end to them,” he added grudgingly.

Steve didn’t say anything.

“We’ll have to go back to Antago to get better equipment, including flashlights, and then we can return,” Pitch went on. “We’ve licked the hardest part, Steve. It’ll only mean losing a couple of days, and we have plenty of time.”

Plenty of time. No
, Steve thought,
I don’t have plenty of time at all. I have two weeks before going home. Two days
mean a lot to me. And we’ve gone through so much to turn back. We may be very near the end of the tunnel now
, he told himself hopefully.
It couldn’t just go on and on!
Yet he wondered if it did. Did this tunnel only lead to others that would take them still deeper within the yellow stone of Azul Island? What then? The matches soon would be gone. Then there would never be a chance of finding their way back.

“I guess you’re right, Pitch,” he said finally. “We have no choice but to go back.”

Standing up, Pitch put his pack upon his shoulders. “We’d better take the pack along,” he said, “just in case—”

Pitch had left his sentence unfinished, but Steve knew perfectly well what he had meant to say.
Just in case they missed the chalked arrows. Just in case they got lost!

Pitch had the large box of matches in his hand. “We really shouldn’t have any trouble,” he said, but there was a grimness to his voice that belied his light tone. “We’ll strike a match every fifty yards or so as we go along. There should be plenty to last. And I have another box if we need them,” he added quickly. “Ready, Steve?”

Strapping the pack to his shoulders and picking up the rope Pitch had dropped when he fell, Steve replied, “Okay, Pitch.”

They had walked only a few steps across the room when Pitch struck the first match. In its glow they saw the pick and shovel. “We’ll leave them behind this time,” Pitch decided.

Before the light dimmed, they both turned toward the cleavage in the wall they had seen a few minutes
earlier. “I’d just like to take a look inside,” Pitch said. “We can spare the match.”

As the match burned out Steve followed Pitch, his hand upon Pitch’s shoulder. Their fingers touched the wall and felt along it to the opening they were seeking.

“Now,” Pitch said, lighting another match.

They stood just within the room, but as the match flared, then steadied, they backed away, startled at what they saw before them. It was a long narrow room with a ceiling no higher than the tunnel. Along the bottom of the wall were iron rings and fastened to each was a short chain—chains that were still around bones that once had been the wrists of many men. Grotesquely, their skeletons still remained sitting upright, their white skulls leaning wearily against the wall. And with the flickering of the match they seemed to move horribly.

Pitch dropped the match and, frantically, he and Steve groped their way through the darkness of the outer chamber until their fingers found the opening leading to the tunnel. Outside they hurriedly turned left, knowing that was the direction from which they had come. They ran until their legs gave way beneath them, then slipped wearily to the floor and lay there in the darkness.

It was a few minutes before Pitch struck a match, and within its glow their faces were still white and taut.

Pitch said almost angrily, “We were very silly to run. We have to be more careful or we’ll lose our way.”

Yes, Steve admitted to himself, it had been silly to run as they had done. Yet one often did things without thinking. This had been one of those times. He was not ashamed, for he knew that many men braver than he or
Pitch would have had a similar reaction to the horrible sight of men who centuries ago had died a living death, chained to the walls of a black pit hundreds of feet beneath the ground.

Soon they started again and found that going up the tunnel was easier on their legs than coming down. At regular intervals Pitch would light a match, and from its glow they would look ahead for the other tunnels they had passed on their way down. Then, as the light flickered and died, they would walk forward again until they came to what they figured had been the range of their last light. They would stop then to light another match before going on.

After more than half an hour Pitch said gravely, “Something must be wrong, Steve. I’m certain we should have run across other tunnels before this. I remember marking one just fifteen minutes or so before we reached the chamber on our way down.”

“Yes,” Steve admitted slowly, “I know you did. Do you think we could have taken another tunnel somewhere along the line? We must have run a hundred yards before we lit our first match.”

“I would say it was more like three hundred yards before we stopped running,” Pitch returned.

“It couldn’t have been, Pitch!” Steve stopped, suddenly realizing that probably neither of them was right. In the darkness they could have run from fifty to five hundred yards for all they knew. Fright did that to a person. “We’d better turn back then,” he said aloud.

“Yes, we’d better.” Pitch made no effort to keep the concern from his voice. They both were aware of the consequences of getting lost.

As they started back down the tunnel Pitch said, “You keep a hand on the right wall when we go along in the dark, Steve. I’ll keep mine on the left wall. That way we won’t slip by any tunnels that may converge with this one. If there’s a break, stop—and I’ll do the same.”

They had walked along for about half an hour when suddenly Steve’s hand encountered nothing but air. “Wait, Pitch!” he called.

Pitch struck a match and they saw another tunnel. “You see we missed this on the way up,” he said. Eagerly they looked for a large white arrow, but found none. “Obviously,” Pitch continued dismally, “we didn’t come down either one of these tunnels on our way to the chamber or there would be an arrow on one of them.”

“Then which one did we just come up?” Steve asked anxiously. “Which one goes back to the chamber?”

Pitch didn’t answer. And Steve couldn’t help him. They simply couldn’t tell, for both tunnels went downward and at this point they came together in a V-shape.

“One’s as good as another,” Steve said. “Let’s take our pick, Pitch.”

Pitch’s round face was grim and his pale blue eyes were but slits in the light of the burning match. “Don’t worry, Steve. We’ve got plenty of matches. We’ll find our way out.”

But still they stood before the two tunnels, neither caring to make the decision. They knew that only one tunnel went back to the chamber where they’d have a chance of picking up the arrows again.

“We could separate,” Steve suggested. “You take
one tunnel and I the other. We’ll come back after going a short way.”

“A short way wouldn’t do it,” Pitch protested. “We must be all of half an hour from the chamber. No, Steve, we’d better stick together. We need each other now.”

“Then let’s go to the right,” Steve suggested quickly. “The right way could be right,” he added without smiling.

Pitch nodded, and once again they made their way downward. They had traveled for about fifteen minutes when the burning match disclosed another tunnel, going still farther to the right.

“This is the end,” Pitch said dismally. “We may have been lucky enough to guess correctly the first time, but doing it again is asking too much of luck.”

Steve said slowly, “Will it be to the right or the left or back?”

They stood there long after the match had burned out, neither saying a word. Finally Pitch struck another match, and in the light their faces were haggard and old, far beyond their years. When the match burned out, Pitch took Steve by the arm and led him down the tunnel to the right.

They went along for an hour, coming across several more tunnels, and always they went to the right without stopping, without talking. It didn’t matter to them which direction they took now, for they were fully convinced they weren’t going to find their way back to the chamber. They still looked hopefully for the chalked arrows each time they came to another tunnel, but they really didn’t expect to find them either now.

After a while their stops to rest became more frequent, for they were conserving their energy. And the intervals between the striking of matches were longer, for the matches too had to be conserved. They needed the matches more than ever now. Not so much for showing them their way, as for the warmth they gave, a spiritual warmth that penetrated deeper and deeper into their very souls as they went along. Each time a match was struck they looked more eagerly at each other, as though they had not seen one another for a long, long time. Darkness did that to people. One could take only so much darkness. Their hands were raw from constant contact with the uneven wall, but they did not know they bled. Their cramped muscles no longer pained them; it was as though they had always walked in this hunched position, and always down, down. Was there no end to this descent? they asked themselves over and over again. Did it end nowhere? Yet the air remained fresh. It had been almost an hour since they had last seen a ventilation shaft running hundreds and hundreds of feet up to the surface. They had stood beneath it a long time, gazing fixedly at the small patch of blue sky above. Yes, it was blue now instead of gray. They had noticed that immediately. The rain must have come and gone, then. They had talked about it at length before giving up their patch of blue for the blackness ahead.