The Adam Chaser

by B. M. Bower

For some time he waited and listened, but the only sounds he heard were the tinkling of the little spring and the shrill chirping of a few cedar birds that had made their home in the crannies of the roof and were very busy with their own small affairs.

Abington grinned to himself as he cautiously approached the little pile of supplies and began a more careful investigation than he had attempted that morning. Two pounds of chewing tobacco—most convincingly had Bill bewailed the loss of those plugs, he remembered. He counted half a dozen cans of corned beef, one of the variations in diet which had been made possible by having three pack burros. Had Bill really imagined he could make Abington believe that the gosh-awful had carried off chewing tobacco and corned beef in cans?

In the face of their loss of the burros Abington had not given much thought to the missing articles from Bill’s outfit. He had visited the cave, viewed the apparent aimlessness of the demolition, had looked for tracks, and, having found the giant sheep tracks in the bottom of the cañon, paid no more attention to the wreckage.

“Bill must have hurried back across the valley after this stuff—no, certain details contradict that,” Abington said to himself. “He must have carried all this stuff on his back, along with what I gave him. Not very bulky—he could have concealed it all in his pack, easily enough. Pretty heavy load it would make! No wonder Bill was grouchy! Took advantage of the gosh-awful’s work and held out a few supplies on me. Clever—but then, the sheriff’s experience with Bill should have warned me to be on the lookout for tricks.”

Abington helped himself to what food he could stow in his pockets, dined on another can of corned beef, took a long drink at the spring and refilled his carbide lamp before he started out again. His plans had changed altogether since he discovered the food cache.

He no longer wanted to get back to the cave where he and Bill had camped, for he did not believe that Bill would be there, nor any of the supplies, and if there were fossilized human skeletons in this region he felt that he would find them just as easily without Bill.

The way out of this particular cavern led him down through another crevice, blocky and splintered as if the whole peak had been twisted asunder; and for the greater part of the distance it was open to the sky.

There were places where it would even have been possible for a man to climb up out of the crevice. But the day was too far gone and Abington had no intention of spending another night underground in aimless wanderings, nor to roost on some dangerous pinnacle until morning.

He emerged at last on a narrow ridge that stood like the crest of a huge, petrified wave between the peak he was leaving and another not quite so high. Intuitively he identified it as the ridge he had dubbed the rooster’s comb—and knew that if he were right he must have come a long way underground. For the cave where he and Bill had spent the night together and from which he had started on his subterranean journey was considerably more than half a mile from the ridge where he had seen the light.

Again the high peaks were gilded with sunlight while the lower slopes glowed scarlet and the deeper shadows merged into warm purple. No artist would ever have dared to mix those barbaric colors, even for a desert sunset; and if he had dared his hand must have lacked the cunning of the Master Painter who daily wrought his magic here on these wild hills where men so seldom ventured.