The Essential Max Brand - 29 Westerns in One Edition. Max Brand
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an ugly sneer. “I don’t like you, Fernand,” he said. “They’s nothing about you that looks good to me. If I knew half as much as I guess about you I’d blow your head off, and go on without ever thinking about you again. But I don’t know. Here you’ve got me up against it. We’re going to go down that tunnel; but, if it’s blind, Fernand, and you trap us from this end, it will be the worst day of your life.”
“Take this passage, Doone, or turn around and come back with me, and I’ll show some other ways of getting out—ways that lie under the open sky, Doone. Would you like that better? Do you want starlight and John Mark— or a little stretch of darkness, all by yourself?” asked Fernand.
Ronicky Doone studied the face of Fernand, almost wistfully. The more he knew about the fellow the more thoroughly convinced he was that Fernand was bad in all possible ways. He might be telling the truth now, however—again he might be simply tempting him on to a danger. There was only one way to decide. Ronicky, a gambler himself, mentally flipped a coin and nodded to Jerry.
“We’ll go in,” he said, “but man, man, how my old scars are pricking!”
They walked into the moldy, damp air of the tunnel, reached the corner, and there the passage turned and ended in a blank wall of raw dirt, with a little apron of fallen debris at the bottom of it. Ronicky Doone walked first, and, when he saw the passage obstructed in this manner, he whirled like a flash and fired at the mouth of the tunnel.
A snarl and a curse told him that he had at least come close to his target, but he was too late. A great door was sliding rapidly across the width of the tunnel, and, before he could fire a second time, the tunnel was closed.
Jerry Smith went temporarily mad. He ran at the door, which had just closed, and struck the whole weight of his body against it. There was not so much as a quiver. The face of it was smooth steel, and there was probably a dense thickness of stonework on the other side, to match the cellar walls of the house.
“It was my fool fault,” exclaimed Jerry, turning to his friend. “My fault, Ronicky! Oh, what a fool I am!”
“I should have known by the feel of the scars,” said Ronicky. “Put out that flash light, Jerry. We may need that after a while, and the batteries won’t last forever.”
He sat down, as he spoke, cross-legged, and the last thing Jerry saw, as he snapped out the light, was the lean, intense face and the blazing eyes of Ronicky Doone. Decidedly this was not a fellow to trifle with. If he trembled for himself and Ronicky, he could also spare a shudder for what would happen to Frederic Fernand, if Ronicky got away. In the meantime the light was out, and the darkness sat heavily beside and about them, with that faint succession of inaudible breathing sounds which are sensed rather than actually heard.
“Is there anything that we can do?” asked Jerry suddenly. “It’s all right to sit down and argue and worry, but isn’t it foolish, Ronicky?”
“How come?”
“I mean it in this way. Sometimes when you can’t solve a problem it’s very easy to prove that it can’t be solved by anyone. That’s what I can prove now, but why waste time?”
“Have we got anything special to do with our time?” asked Ronicky dryly.
“Well, my proof is easy. Here we are in hard-pan dirt, without any sort of a tool for digging. So we sure can’t tunnel out from the sides, can we?”
“Looks most like we can’t,” said Ronicky sadly.
“And the only ways that are left are the ends.”
“That’s right.”
“But one end is the unfinished part of the tunnel; and, if you think we can do anything to the steel door—”
“Hush up,” said Ronicky. “Besides, there ain’t any use in you talking in a whisper, either. No, it sure don’t look like we could do much to that door. Besides, even if we could, I don’t think I’d go. I’d rather take a chance against starvation than another trip to fat Fernand’s place. If I ever enter it again, son, you lay to it that he’ll get me bumped off, mighty pronto.”
Jerry Smith, after a groan, returned to his argument. “But that ties us up, Ronicky. The door won’t work, and it’s worse than solid rock. And we can’t tunnel out the side, without so much as a pin to help us dig, can we? I think that just about settles things. Ronicky, we can’t get out.”
“Suppose we had some dynamite,” said Ronicky cheerily.
“Sure, but we haven’t.”
“Suppose we find some?”
Jerry Smith groaned. “Are you trying to make a joke out of this? Besides, could we send off a blast of dynamite in a closed tunnel like this?”
“We could try,” said Ronicky. “Way I’m figuring is to show you it’s bad medicine to sit down and figure out how you’re beat. Even if you owe a pile of money they’s some satisfaction in sitting back and adding up the figures so that you come out about a million dollars on top—in your dreams. Before we can get out of here we got to begin to feel powerful sure.”
“But you take it straight, friend: Fernand ain’t going to leave us in here. Nope, he’s going to find a way to get us out. That’s easy to figure out. But the way he’ll get us out will be as dead ones, and then he can dump us, when he feels like it, in the river. Ain’t that the simplest way of working it out?”
The teeth of Jerry Smith came together with a snap. “Then the thing for us to do is to get set and wait for them to make an attack?”
“No use waiting. When they attack it’ll be in a way that’ll give us no chance.”
“Then you figure the same as me—we’re lost?”
“Unless we can get out before they make the attack. In other words, Jerry, there may be something behind the dirt wall at the end of the tunnel.”
“Nonsense, Ronicky.”
“There’s got to be,” said Ronicky very soberly, “because, if there ain’t, you and me are dead ones, Jerry. Come along and help me look, anyway.”
Jerry rose obediently and flashed on his precious pocket torch, and they went down to pass the turn and come again to the ragged wall of earth which terminated the passage. Jerry held the torch and passed it close to the dirt. All was solid. There was no sign of anything wrong. The very pick marks were clearly defined.
“Hold on,” whispered Ronicky Doone. “Hold on, Jerry. I seen something.” He snatched the electric torch, and together they peered at the patch from which the dried earth had fallen.
“Queer for hardpan to break up like that,” muttered Ronicky, cutting into the surface beneath the patch, with the point of his hunting knife. Instantly there was the sharp gritting of steel against steel.
The shout of Ronicky was an indrawn breath. The shout of Jerry Smith was a moan of relief.
Ronicky continued his observations. The thing was very clear. They had dug the tunnel to this point and excavated a place which they had guarded with a steel door, but, in order to conceal the hiding place, or whatever it might be, they cunningly worked the false wall of dirt against the face of it, using clay and a thin coating of plaster as a base.
“It’s a place they don’t use very often, maybe,” said Ronicky, “and that’s why they can afford to put up this fake wall of plaster and mud after every time they want to come down here. Pretty clever to leave that little pile of dirt on the floor, just like it had been worked off by the picks, eh? But we’ve found ‘em, Jerry, and now all we got to do is to get to the door and into whatever lies beyond.”
“We’d better hurry, then,” cried Jerry.
“How come?”
“Take a breath.”
Ronicky obeyed; the air was beginning to fill with the pungent