It showed the Apaches crouching and shooting their arrows—but it showed also a figure in a flying serapé climbing rapidly up the cleft toward the cave mouth. A sputtering fire shot out sparks; then, as the bellowing roar of Big John’s .35 rent the night, there came a sizzling arc of fire, followed at once by the tremendous, shattering detonation of dynamite!
Red Mesa rocked to its foundations. A long-drawn subterranean moan came from the bowels of the rocks, a growl like a distant thunder—then silence! Sid had gotten one glimpse of a man being blown to bits in the white glare of that explosion which seemed to spew cannonlike out of the bowels of the mountain, then his eyes saw nothing, blinded for an instant by the intensity of it.
“Yah! Greaser!” gritted Big John’s voice in rising intensity of feeling. “Ye done it—curse ye!” Then Sid heard him fall back with a weary, hopeless sigh.
Pitchy darkness! a dreadful, tense and tragic silence! a stunning, appalling silence, wherein all the world held its breath and Sid on the ledge felt his senses grow numb before the portentous import of it! Had Vasquez succeeded?
CHAPTER XII
OUT OF THE DESERT
AS Sid’s scattered wits returned to connected thought, after the first few moments following that stunning detonation, his mind and his hopes went out first to Scotty. How could he and the Apaches down there have survived, right in the storm center of that explosion? For a time he dared not even call out, nor was there the least sound of human beings alive down there to reassure him. Not even a faint groan came up to his listening ears.
Still there was at least a ray of hope. That white glare of the explosion had come out like the flare from the mouth of a cannon. The tunnel, in fact, was a vast stone cannon. Vasquez, true to Sid’s diagnosis of the Latin mind, had planned his coup logically, had thrown the bundle of dynamite sticks fair and true right into the mouth of the cave where it would do the most damage. But he had not reckoned on the laws of mechanics, the immutable principles of action and reaction. For the forces of that explosion had blown right back upon him who had thrown the charge. It had rent him to bits, and Sid had seen enough to be sure that the victim had been the rash Vasquez himself.
Was there not a hope, then, that Scotty and the Apaches, standing to one side of the direct blast, had survived it? A man can stand near the muzzle of a twelve-inch naval gun and yet not be hurt, beyond the temporary shock to ears and nerves.
In spite of the appalling stillness which kept up, Sid found courage at last to call out.
“Scotty! Leslie, old chum!—Are you still alive?” his voice quavered out into the night.