The pair traversed the valley and crossed the creek over a bridge built of unbarked cedar logs. At the base of the cliffs the trail turned sharply to the left and followed the course of the creek upwards for about an eighth of a mile. There it again swung through the thick-grown green stuff, this time to the right, disclosing a hidden draw in the cliffs. They could no longer see the creek, but they could hear its murmur somewhere to their left.
Suddenly out of the sunlit upper air there came a sullen rumble of thunder that died away in the most sinister of echoes. The girl clutched Hammond’s arm. “I am really getting frightened,” she whispered.
“Oh, that’s only an echo of sound waves caught from dear knows where in this chasm,” he assured her. “This no doubt is the entrance to the Cup.”
They pushed on, up and up. Though fairly steep the trail was well-worn and clean-going. Soon they found themselves out of the woods but shut in by high rock walls. The aisle through the living rock finally ended abruptly, but to their left yawned the opening of a man-high tunnel along which the trail apparently continued. From out of this came the low thunder of waterfalls and the swishing purl and splash of rapids.
Then, above them this time it seemed, they heard the melodious alarum of the mysterious gong. The rumble of rapids grew fainter and fainter and finally almost died away.
“Do you think we should go on?” the girl asked anxiously.
“Let’s go to the edge of the creek anyway,” he suggested. “It must be at the other end of this tunnel.”
Josephine Stone looked up the towering black walls that hemmed them in like a prison. “It makes one think,” she said, “that there might be something in the Indian superstition that an awful spirit presides in these cliffs.”
“Nothing to that,” laughed Hammond, “but the fruit of poor Lo’s untutored mind and his over-active imagination.”
But this carefree young man little dreamed of the grim guardian of the way to the Cup which kept inviolable the secrets beyond the cliffs—a white monster, which, once unleashed, could not be recalled by its masters till it had wreaked its will to destroy.