When in the dusk he came slipping and sliding down an old sheep trail long since abandoned for a more favored path, however, there was no wounded man to be seen in the little basin. Like a shot quail that flutters for a moment among the bushes and is lost, the man somehow had managed to crawl away and disappear.
Abington called Bill’s name again and again while he lighted the carbide lamp. And as the white light sprang out and drove back the shadows, a gunshot roared just under the cliff for answer to his hail.
As he leaped sidewise, Abington shut off the lamp, then rushed the spot where the gun had flashed. By good luck he spied the vague bulk just as the rifle was being painfully lifted for another shot. He snatched at the barrel and wrenched the gun free—by the feeble resistance of the other gauging shrewdly his waning strength.
“Venomous kind of snake, aren’t you?” Abington observed with pitying contempt, as he leaned the rifle against the cliff and started to relight the lamp.
The light flared up. Abington stooped, gave a shocked exclamation as he started back, recovered himself and stooped again. The man was not Bill Jonathan, but a gaunt old fellow with high cheek bones and a straight gash of a mouth drawing an evil line through his grizzled beard. He was a total stranger, wounded and collapsed against the cliff; beaten and utterly passive now, like a trapped animal that will not move unless it sees some chance of escape.
“By Jove, I’m glad it wasn’t Bill, at any rate!” Abington ejaculated as he knelt to make a superficial examination. “Shot through the side,” he diagnosed to himself. “Well below the heart. Serious enough, but by no means fatal with the proper care—and that is going to be something of a problem in existing conditions. Might better have made a clean job of it—glad I didn’t, though.
“Well,” he asked aloud, “where’s your camp? If it doesn’t involve too much climbing I’ll try and get you home.” He waited while the old man’s eyes remained fixed on him with a baleful stare. “Doesn’t understand, maybe.”
He tried French, German and a passable Italian, keenly watching the eyes that never once changed their homicidal glare. He sat back on his haunches and studied the glowering face with less personal emotion than he would have displayed before an odd pattern of the Maya death mask, and decided that the man had understood his first question well enough and was merely stubborn.
“Of course, if you want to lie here all night, that’s your privilege, I suppose,” Abington said finally, standing up and glancing around at the confining walls of the dusk-filled basin. He turned the light again on the old man’s forbidding countenance, made more sinister by the pain he was suffering.
“Are your field glasses equipped with night lenses?” Abington asked abruptly, and silently laughed at the startled wavering of those colorless eyes.