Scoland sneered. He lay watching the straining rope. It seemed to fascinate him. His hand crept to the knife at his belt. Slowly he drew it, and laid its keen blade against the rope. A wave of weakness came over him. Alone, he could never reach the camp. He put away the knife.
One by one Polaris brought up the huskies. He placed Scoland on his own sledge and drove back to the camp, leaving the wreck to be recovered later.
Not one word of thanks did Scoland speak to him for his deliverance. All the way back to the camp the captain lay on the sledge with closed eyes. All the way he cursed furiously within himself that it should be his fortune to take his life at the hands of this one man of all men.
No more was battle done on the steep slope of Mount Latmos. Assured that Minos and his men were holed in where they might not come at them, the fighting men of the priest went up against the cave no more. Although they must have known that the treasure cave was provisioned and watered so abundantly that it would keep its small garrison for many months, they did not give up their siege entirely. That was discovered when one of the hunters thought to go forth by stealth in the slumber hours, and pay a visit to his wife and children at his home in the valley. Hardly was he over the ledge of the plateau when men seized him in the dusk.
His comrades in the cave above heard him scream out once and twice, and then the minions of Analos cut his throat.
On their part, the hunters maintained a guard of one man at all hours, who sat behind the boulder in the passageway.
Late in the fourth day that they had been immured in the mountainside, Dukulon, one of Zalos's men, as he stood his turn at guard, heard a rapping at the mouth of the pass as one who tapped gently on the wall with a stone.
"Who cometh?" he hailed.
"Sh—it is I, Alternes," came the whispered answer. "I would have speech with Minos the King."