He lifted a fragment of rock and crashed it against the wall from which those rappings apparently had come. Laboriously he spelled out his name, remembering the dots and dashes from earlier flying days when planes had been equipped with key-senders. He spelled it slowly and waited, while only the silence beat upon him and the blood pounded in his ears. Then he heard it. The answer came from a quicker hand:
"Rawson—this is Smithy."
But Smithy was dead! What could it mean? Slowly Rawson pounded out the letters of his question: "Where—are—you?" The answer dispelled his last doubt as to the reality of what he had heard.
It was Smithy. Others were with him, for Smithy said "we," and they were prisoners, sealed up in a living tomb. But where? Smithy did not know. He knew only that they were in a big room where the rocks had been shattered and molten gold spilled on the floor. There was a hole in the roof, but too small to get through—a round hole, about eight inches in diameter. And, at that, Rawson interrupted to tap out a single word.
"Coming!" he said, and turned toward Loah and the light.
The girl had found a metal rope in her wanderings; she had used it to let herself down into the cave. And now it was she who helped Dean to pull his bruised body up and into the narrow crack. Loah had clung to the flame-thrower; they found it where she had left it up above.
The tapping rocks she could not understand, but she knew Dean had a definite plan in mind when he whispered: "The room where you first found me—do you remember? Do you know the way?"
"I will always remember," she said simply. "And, yes, I know the way."
Rawson caught glimpses now and again of that broad thoroughfare along which he had once traveled, a prisoner of the mole-men. But Loah knew other and seldom-used passages that roughly paralleled it; and then, after a time, Rawson himself knew in what direction they must go.
He knew, too, that they had followed a circular route, and that the room in which he had been sealed was not a great way from the place in which Smithy was a prisoner. Yet this had been his only way to reach it.