“And I have more than a thousand Mauser rifles here, and more than a million rounds of ammunition!”
“How did you get them?”
“I shall tell you that later. Come and see some other things. See and believe!”
She showed him a cave in which boxes were stacked in high square piles.
“Dynamite bombs!” she boasted. “How many boxes? I forget! Too many to count! Women brought them all the way from the sea, for even Muhammad Anim could not make Afridi riflemen carry loads. I have wondered what Bull-with-a-beard will say when he misses his precious dynamite!”
“You've enough in there to blow the mountain up!” King advised her. “If somebody fired a pistol in here, the least would be the collapse of this floor into the tunnel below with a hundred thousand tons of rock on top of it. There is no other way out?”
“Earth's Drink!” she said, and he made a grimace that set her to laughing.
But she looked at him darkly after that and he got the impression that the thought was not new to her, and that she did not thank him for the advice. He began to wonder whether there was anything she had not thought of--any loophole she had left him for escape--any issue she had not foreseen.
“Kill her!” a secret voice urged him. But that was the voice of the “Hills,” that are violent first and regretful afterward. He did not listen to it. And then the wisdom of the West came to him, as epitomized by Cocker along the lines laid down by Solomon.
“It isn't possible to make a puzzle that has no solution to it. The fact that it's a puzzle is the proof that there's a key! Go ahead!”