He pulled up short, and, drawing his sheath-knife, sprang to where grew half a dozen or more huge puff-balls. Three of these he detached, handling them with great care. Carrying them out into the very centre of the gorge, he piled them in a heap.
His friends had stopped their flight as they noted his strange actions, and now stood watching him, Seymour admiringly, Mervyn with blank astonishment depicted on every feature.
“You’re a genius, Silas!” exclaimed the baronet, as, under the American’s orders, they placed a safe distance between themselves and the puff-balls. “I should never have thought of that.”
“But surely,” Mervyn began, “you don’t mean to say that those things are explosive? Why——”
“It was one of them same that bust the elk-hunters we told you about, anyway,” retorted the Yankee, his voice almost lost in the thunder of hoofs.
The next instant a dozen huge forms loomed through the twilight, racing three abreast down the gorge. The foremost of them were almost upon the fungi pile, when Silas and the baronet fired, their shots crashing simultaneously into the puff-balls. A dazzling sheet of flame leapt high above the pile, illuminating for a moment the great shaggy bodies and huge curved tusks of the stampeding animals.
“Mammoths!” gasped the scientist.
His exclamation was drowned in the shrill trumpeting of the terrified pachyderms, which was drowned in turn by the thunderous roar of the explosion as the puff-balls did their work.
The fugitives, flung violently to the earth by the shock, were scarcely conscious of what followed. The ground rocked furiously beneath them, creating a violent nausea, which left them sick for hours; immense masses of rock, torn from the face of the cliffs by the frightful force of the explosion, crashed heavily into the gorge, and above all the terrible uproar rang the shrill screaming of the dying animals.
But the din ceased at length, and then the three comrades staggered to their feet. Badly shaken they were, but otherwise they had received no hurt, and they gave thanks as only men can who have escaped from the very jaws of death.