He half expected to find that Carroll had spent the night there, but he found no sign of it. The fire still smoldered, burning far down into the coal seam now, and all the earth about it was heated. He turned in the direction he had followed the night before, moving warily now, expectant every instant of a shot from ambush, but he had gone several hundred yards before he found any trace of his man.
Then, all at once, he saw him. He saw him from a distance, and with such a shock that he half raised the rifle. But Carroll’s posture was reassurance enough.
He hastened up. Carroll was lying face down at the edge of a clump of cedar, his hat off, his limbs sprawling. He looked dead, but there was life in his pulse when Lang touched his wrist.
The emeralds! Lang felt his pockets, turned him over. They were empty. He ran his hands all over the man’s body. There was no bulging package anywhere, no loose stones about his clothing.
He was dumfounded. He had never dreamed of such a check. There was a bullet wound in Carroll’s head, no doubt from the last shot that Lang had fired into the thicket. He must have staggered several yards afterward. He had thrown the stones away, or dropped them. One trousers leg was stiff with blood, too. That was from Lang’s first shot, and probably Carroll had cached the jewels immediately after finding himself wounded.
Lang looked about on the ground, moved the body to see if anything was under it. The earth was overgrown with moss and ferns. That little silk package would be lost like a needle in straw. It might be anywhere within half a mile. Carroll alone could tell what he had done with it.
After casting wildly about for several yards, he came back and for the first time examined Carroll’s wound. The bullet had entered the skull almost above the ear, rather high. It had not emerged, but Lang could feel that it was just below the skin near the opposite temple.
It was not necessarily fatal. He had seen such a case before in his Boston clinic. He had operated then, and with success. He sat down by the unconscious man and fell into a profound study, and for the time the emeralds passed out of his mind.
He remembered to fire the double signal shot, and relapsed into thought again. If he only had a trephine—the little drill that cuts a round piece out of bone! He heard Morrison halloing from a distance, responded, and presently the explorer came up, panting, holding a cocked Winchester at the ready. His eye fell instantly on the prostrate figure.
“Dead?” he asked quickly. “Have you got the stones?”