Lucia suddenly spoke, a joyous break in her voice that was nevertheless like a sob. "I see a faint light in the distance—we are truly nearing the exit." She looked up at Lloyd through tears in her eyes. He felt her hand grow light on his arm, her step quicken at his side—so does hope control the nerves, the muscles.
But it was his turn to doubt. He had what is called "a head for localities." The entrance which he remembered had for a distance longer than the light of day could be glimpsed a straight blank wall on one side, without an aperture or a break, which fact had made it possible for Frank Laniston to go and return without a guide. Whereas here there were vast spaces of void darkness on either side, the path was damp and slippery in places, and he could smell the breath of running water, and hear the vague susurrus that echoed the murmur of its flow. There it had been as still as death, but for the whisking of the almost noiseless wings of the disturbed bats and now and then their weird mouse-like cry, and dust, dust, dust, was over all the dry precincts of the way. He suddenly spoke his conviction. "That is undoubtedly light," he said, "but this is not the way by which we came into the cave."
The guide caught the words and paused abruptly. He showed a change anew. He seemed suddenly metamorphosed from the malignant, tricky gnome, fleeing from them as they approached, or the madman aping the bird's cry of evil presage as he threaded the endless labyrinth of this subterranean realm. He was now the simple prosaic yokel whom, of their own free will outside, they had hired as a guide to explore a cave as a bit of pastime in a pastoral day.
"Waal," he remonstrated, doggedly sullen as at first, "didn't you uns say ez ye wanted the shortes' way out; this is the shortes' way."
"But I expected of course to go out at the same place—I wanted the shortest way to that exit," said Lloyd sternly. "You know that our horses are not here."
"But only a leetle piece off," the fellow remonstrated. A real owl began to rive the dark still air with his keen shrilling, and anon his low tremulous chatter. The guide paused to listen to the sound and then went on. "I thought she mought rest outside whilst I went to lead down her horse-critter." Once more he paused to listen to the scream of the owl. The whole place echoed and re-echoed its sinister chuckle. "But now I kem ter study 'bout 'n it I misdoubts it be too steep fur she. Jes' step for'd, stranger, an' see. It be jes' round the turn."
Before Frank could warn Lloyd, before Lucia could utter a word of remonstrance, before Lloyd himself took an instant's thought, he dropped Lucia's hand from his arm and stepped around the great buttress of the cliff, the mountaineer at his side.
Lloyd's figure was suddenly defined in a great glare of artificial light and what he saw the others only knew afterward. Descent was obviously impracticable. Sheer down, but only some twenty-five feet, lay a vast replica of the white cavernous hall they had quitted, with stalactites and stalagmites all a-glitter; but here was habitation, movement; strange, troglodytic figures, with skulking black shadows, shifted about amongst the columns; prosaic suggestions environed the great vats and tubs, barrels and sacks of grain, the metallic glimmer of a large copper still, and the open door of a furnace, the fire flaring to a white heat. So silent had been the approach under the normal cavernous sound of the owl's shrilling that not one of the moonshiners looked up as Lloyd looked down. Only when the guide, impatient for the catastrophe, uttered a sharp, short call did they raise their eyes. Lloyd, dumbfounded, instinctively stepped backward, and at this moment Frank, eager with curiosity, flung the lantern forward as he moved, and thus the shadow of the guide was projected from the darkness on the floor below.
It was the boast of Shadrach Pinnott that he had not missed his aim for thirty years. It did not fail him now. He saw the form of a man standing at gaze in a niche in the wall which vanished suddenly from view; then a shadow fell from the niche across the floor below. With a nice calculation of the station of the figure that threw the shadow he fired and the rocks reverberated with the sharp crack of the rifle like the musketry of a battle, and intermingled with it all were the repetitious echoes of the death-cry of the victim.
The body of the guide, as, mortally wounded, he fell forward, slid downward into the moonshiners' lair. The next moment the door of the furnace clashed and all was darkness and silence. Lloyd and Frank, realising that the height on which they stood and the doubt of their numbers and personality precluded pursuit for a time from the distillers on a lower level, made the best of their way with the lantern, carrying the half-fainting Lucia with them, toward the direction in which they had entered, so far as their recollection might serve. How they would have fared in their dazed and exhausted condition, what disastrous fate might have befallen them they often speculated afterward. But it was not long before they heard the resonant halloos of the searching party summoned by Jardine to their rescue, and only the detail of the extraordinary treachery and fate of their guide saved them from very trenchant ridicule, in that land of sylvan prowess, for involving themselves in a trap whence they must needs be extricated by raising the countryside.