CHAPTER XVI
LOST IN A PREHISTORIC MINE
After the disappearance of the young rider, whose coming had so materially changed the plan of Rothsky and his associate scoundrels, they gazed at each other for a full minute in sullen silence. In the minds of two of them the anger of their disappointment was mingled with a cowardly terror at the awful deed they had committed, and they began fiercely to denounce their leader for having implicated them in it.
Rothsky answered with equal bitterness that he was no more to blame than they, and the quarrel grew so furious that for a time it seemed as though only the shedding of blood could settle it. At length they were quieted by a realizing sense of the common danger that might only be averted by mutual support. So they finally swore with strange oaths never to betray each other, or breathe a word to a living soul of what had just taken place.
Of course they did not for a moment anticipate that their crime would ever come to light, though each was secretly determined that if it did he would promptly secure his own safety by denouncing his comrades.
With the patching up of this truce and the forming of their worthless compact the three wretches prepared to depart from the scene of their villany. First, however, they advanced cautiously as close as they dared to the edge of the pit into which they had flung their victim, and, peering into its blackness, listened fearfully. No sound broke the awful silence, and of a sudden the three men, moved by a common impulse, turned and fled through the darkness, stumbling and falling, clutched at by invisible fingers as they ran, and uttering inarticulate cries of terror.
At that same moment their victim was lying on a ledge of rock deep down in the ground beneath them, still alive, but numbed almost into unconsciousness by the hopeless horror of his situation. In the first agony of falling he had instinctively exerted a strength of which he would have been incapable under other circumstances, and burst asunder the bonds confining his arms.
He believed that in a moment he would be dashed into eternity, and yet a medley of incongruous and commonplace thoughts darted through his mind with inconceivable rapidity. Innumerable scenes of his past life glanced before him, but more distinct than any, sharp and clear as though revealed by a flash of lightning, shone the wonderful eyes that had appeared to him from the red-stained cliffs overlooking the great lake. And, strangest of all, the face seemed to smile at him with a promise of hope.