The Spanish Cave (9 page)

They chugged slowly back along the channel.

Meanwhile Hal and Father Juan had become thoroughly alarmed at the continued silence. They tried to entertain each other, but every attempt at conversation ended in a silence while each stared into the darkness and strained his ears to catch the least sound. Father Juan at last took out his breviary and settled down to compose his
thoughts. Hal achieved the same result by setting himself problems in trigonometry.

At length the cable spoke:

Bzzzz—bz—bz—bzzzz.

Hal leant eagerly over the buzzer. That faint sound was all he might ever hear of Dick.

“Are returning to cross-roads,” came the message. “All well. Please reel in.”

Hal and Father Juan wound up the wet cable. No message came through for some minutes. Then the buzzer talked again:

“This looks like it. Low wide passage. Can hardly get boat underneath. Pablo sounding.”

After a short silence Dick reported:

“Thirty feet of water. Rabbit could get in and out though we find it difficult. Have to lie down to get under. Echegaray thinks this connects with first cleft we passed where we heard waterfall. If so we are pretty close to you.”

“What does he say?” asked Father Juan.

“They think they have reached the creature's hiding place,” answered Hal, “and it sounds as if they might never get out again once they are in.”

The two sat on the edge of the rock, listening eagerly for any sounds of the party's progress.

Suddenly a great wave came rolling down the passage, and thudded against the foot of the rock. It was followed by another and another until the whole cave was filled
with the splash and rumble of water. The cable whizzed madly off the drum.

Hal jumped to the telegraph.

“Heavy wash breaking on rock,” he tapped. “Look out. Something on the move.”

The first three words of Hal's message were all that got through. At the moment Dick was lying back in the stern with his hand on the tiller. They had dismounted the headlight for it stuck up too high to pass under the roof. Consequently they did not dare to proceed under power. Echegaray and Pablo lay flat in the bows, pushing the boat forwards into the darkness by running their hands along the roof above them. All three had handkerchiefs tied over their noses and mouths, for the stench was nearly unbearable.

“Don Ramon,” whispered Dick, “Hal says there's a heavy wash breaking. I've tried to reply but the line's dead. I think the cable has broken.”

“Full speed, Ricardito,” said Echegaray. “We don't want to be caught in here. And keep your head down!”

Dick opened the throttle and the boat shot forwards. Echegaray and Pablo lay on the bottom and prayed. For the moment they were not so concerned with what had caused the swell as with the swell itself. Any wave more than a foot high would jam the boat against the roof, fill, and sink it.

The swell arrived, caught, and lifted them. They
waited in agony for the crash, but it didn't come. The boat shot purring through the darkness, pitching and scattering foam from the bows. By the echo of the motor they could tell that they had passed out into some cavern bigger than any they had seen.

“That will do,” ordered Echegaray. “Throw her into reverse, Ricardito, to take the way off! Lord knows what we may hit in a minute.”

The propeller churned up the water, and the boat slowly came to a standstill. Then Dick shut off the motor.

“Phew!” whistled Don Ramon. “That's the closest shave I ever had in my life. If Hal hadn't warned us, we should have been smashed to splinters. And now let's get that headlight going, and see where we are.”

By the light of a candle he and Pablo rigged the headlamp on its swivel, working with quick fingers and now and again glancing over their shoulders into the threatening darkness. The ferret was without its eyes and defenceless. And evidently the rabbit, as Echegaray euphemistically called it, had discovered that it was being hunted.

At last the white beam shot out across the water. It was greeted by a whirring, hissing roar; the sound that Dick had heard when he kept his watch in the Cave of the Angels. Gathering force, it quivered and pulsated and finally broke into the siren shriek on a note so high that Pablo could not longer hear it. He looked wonderingly at Dick and Echegaray, who had their
hands over their ears and were shuddering as the thin sound tore through them. They turned the headlight in the direction of the sound. It died away. There was nothing to be seen but a black, jagged hole, from which ripples and waves were rolling as something within lashed the water.

Turning the beam around and overhead, they saw that they were in a roughly circular cavern, so vast that it seemed like the inside of a hollow mountain. A waterfall plashed down from an unseen height. There were only two entrances; the low one through which they had come, and the other where lurked their quarry.

“That hole must lead straight through to the main channel close to the rock,” remarked Echegaray. “I expect the beast stuck his head out, and got tangled up in the cable.”

“I'm glad we didn't take that turning when we started out,” Dick said.

“Yes. We need plenty of sea room to fight a brute which can make that much noise. And we've got it,” said Echegaray, looking round him appreciatively. “We'll wait here and hope that our friend will attack. I feel he's working up his courage.”

The old Basque stood in the bows, with one foot on the gunwale and a bomb poised ready in his right hand.

A single big wave left the dark passage, and then the motion of the water died down. Echegaray and Pablo exchanged glances. Neither said a word, for they
did not want to alarm Dick; but both suspected that the creature was advancing on them, not storming across the surface as Echegaray assumed it would, but silently and under water.

Pablo turned the headlight in slow circles. It showed nothing but the still, inky water. The only sound was the plashing of the waterfall. The minutes passed.

“Carajo!”
hissed Pablo. “Look!”

The beam was reflected in three glittering surfaces just below the water. Two of them were undoubtedly eyes, bulbous and glaring. The third, which lay between them, looked somewhat like the pearly eye of a blind man. It had no power of movement and no sort of intelligence in it. It was a small, flat disc, alive with faint and changing shades of mauve, red and green. The three organs silently submerged as the light fell on them.

“Open up the motor, Ricardito,” ordered Echegaray. “We'd better keep moving.”

They knew that they had changed from the hunters to the hunted. It was not a pleasant thought.

The first sign of the beast's attack was the stench that rose from the water behind them like a solid thing. Pablo swung the beam across the stern. Towering over them was a vast, slimy stomach with two huge flippers outspread like wings. The neck and head were far above the field of the light. The whole bulk was poised in the act of plunging down upon them. With one
instantaneous movement Echegaray hurled his bomb and flung himself across Dick's body.

The darkness split open with a flash and a shattering explosion that filled the air with flying flesh and metal. Dick felt Echegaray's protecting body jump and palpitate, and a stream of warm blood trickled over his head. The stern was lifted high in the air and the boat shot sickeningly down a slope of water. He heard the motor roar open, as Pablo jumped for the tiller and backed against the wall of the cavern. It stopped. He was relieved of smothering weight, and knew that Pablo had disentangled himself from the heap and was lifting Echegaray's body off him. Dick struggled to his feet, coughing and choking in the acrid fumes of the explosion. He saw that the Basque's arm and shoulder had been shattered by a fragment of the bomb. Pablo's clothes were hanging in ribbons; his skin was burnt and bleeding from several flesh wounds.

“Get forward, Ricardito,” Pablo whispered, “and keep the light circling. Try a long distance shot if you see the thing again. I must patch up Don Ramon.”

Dick obeyed instantly. Then he asked:

“What happened?”

“I spit in the milk! The brute was so close that the bomb meant almost certain death for us. Thank God you're not hurt, boy!”

“And Don Ramon?” asked Dick with a catch in his voice.

“He'll pull through,” murmured Echegaray shakily,
“if you can close that artery, Pablo. Don't look back, Ricardito! Our lives depend on your eyes. That devil isn't dead yet.”

Pablo cut away what was left of Don Ramon's jersey, and twisted a cord tightly around his arm above the severed artery. Then he bound up arm and shoulder with the long red sash from his waist. Meanwhile Dick swung the light in a semicircle, peering steadily along the beam.

The beast did not leave them long in doubt. Its head, supported by a long, serpentine neck, rose twenty feet above the water and moved towards the boat. The head was not unlike that of an alligator, but broader and deeper. It was very small in comparison to the enormous barrel-shaped body. In the middle of the forehead was the motionless disc of jelly. Dick pulled the wire of a bomb, and, aiming at that unnatural organ, tossed it in a long, slow curve.

It fell short, but in the blast of yellow light Dick saw the creature's head jerk back. Then a column of white water reared up, and hung for an instant like a broad, shady tree of foam. The beam of the headlight waved in dizzy circles as the boat pitched and rocked on the swell. Now and again it fell on the great neck coiling and recoiling. The neck was no longer smooth and slimy. The explosion had ripped off rows of the heavy scales. They hung like broken leaves, dripping blood.

Dick did not give the beast time to recover. It was
impossible to throw straight, almost impossible to stand, for the waves reverberated from every direction. The wash from the two explosions was still leaping back and forth between the walls of the cavern. Rocks loosened by the blast slithered and plunged into the water, setting up new turmoil. The boat heaved as madly as a toy boat in a swimming pool when a score of men are diving into the tank around it. Choosing his moment when a charging slope of water flung the boat upwards, Dick let fly a second bomb. A cross wave spoilt his direction and nearly threw him overboard, but again the bomb fell close to the target, and the horrible head was enveloped in flame and water.

This time the beast had had enough. Great shreds and festoons of torn flesh hung from its chest. Dropping its head on the surface, it bolted into the black tunnel out of which it had come. They caught a glimpse of its full length—twenty feet of neck, fifty feet of barrel-shaped body, and a tail that might have been fifteen or twenty feet more.

“After him!” murmured Echegaray. “After him!”

Dick returned to his post at the motor, and cut away the useless telegraph cable. Pablo worked his way to the bows, and stood crouching over the locker like a massive figurehead, with his stocky legs firmly jammed against the ribs of the boat. They plunged across the cave through the jumping water, and shot into the black hole beyond. Pablo stared along the beam of the light, snapping out rapid changes of course.

“Hard a port!” came the final order.

Dick put the helm over. They skidded round a corner, and out into the main channel. There was the giant reptile a little ahead of them, churning through the water towards the rock. Hal and Father Juan saw the savage head driving down channel like a torpedo. They were ready, for they had heard the screams of the beast and the distant roar of the explosions. Hal grasped a bomb, but before he could throw it the boat flashed into sight hard on the beast's tail, and he heard Pablo's warning shout. Slamming the water with outspread flippers, the beast made a leap for the rock. At the same moment Pablo planted a bomb close under its tail. The reptile seemed to hang for an instant on a pillar of fire and foam. Its tail lashed in and out of the darkness. Its body seemed vast and formless in the writhing fumes of the explosion. Then it flopped on to the rock, and struck at the two men with a vicious sidelong lunge of its neck. Accustomed to darkness, it miscalculated the distance in the dim light. The head struck Hal and Father Juan like a battering ram, but the mouth was not open to seize them. They were shot head over heels into the hollow where Dick had once spent the night. The reptile slithered over the rock and dropped with a thunderous plunge into the channel that led to the open sea.

Dick raced up the rope ladder, and jumped into the hollow where Hal and Father Juan lay in a tangled heap. They were both breathing, but knocked unconscious.
He propped them up and loosened their clothing. In a few seconds Hal opened his eyes.

“Thank the Lord you're all right, kid,” he said.

“And you, Hal? Where does it hurt you?”

“Sore all over, but I don't think any damage is done,” answered Hal, making an effort to sit up.

He felt his chest and sides carefully.

“Ouch! There's a rib broken! But that's nothing— how's the padre?”

“All right,” answered Father Juan feebly. “A cut on the forehead and all the wind knocked out of me, but plenty of fight left. … Heavens, Ricardito!”

Dick looked more badly hurt than any of them. He had nothing solid on him but his belt, from which shirt and shorts hung in shreds. His skin was black and caked with blood, his own, Echegaray's, and the beast's. But as a matter of fact he had suffered nothing worse than a varied assortment of cuts and bruises.

“Don't worry about me, padre,” he said. “I'm a bit dirty—that's all. Let's see to Don Ramon. His arm's half off.”

The three scrambled back on to the rock. Father Juan tucked up his cassock, and painfully let himself down the ladder.

“Hola, the padre!” said Pablo with a pretence of cheeriness. “Can you help me get him up?”

Father Juan looked at him keenly.

“You're hurt, too, Pablo,” he said.