But then he remembered that he had not his rifle with him. Nothing but the little inadequate .32-20. The quicker he got back and came up here with that rifle, the better, for the Black Panther would be quite likely to revisit his lair, perhaps this very day.
Sid climbed down by the pueblo trail he had first discovered and worked up through the spruces up the valley, confident that he would soon find a way out and speculating on how to get down from the plateau above into the chasm where his camp was. But the rim walls of the box canyon offered him little encouragement. Three hundred feet above him they towered, with bare, stratified and perpendicular walls after the lower slopes of talus ended. The large spruces in the valley contented themselves with a root hold in the wet soil in its ravine. Nowhere did they come near enough to the cliffs to be of any use in climbing out.
Sid pushed through them, looking for the place where the cliff dwellers had come into and left the canyon, for, of course, a community of people could not have lived shut up in here. But, when he burst through the tree growth at the canyon head, already the high walls of a cliff, partly seen through the trees ahead, had given him a warning of his fate. This canyon had no head slope! Instead, a giant wall of granite stretched before his troubled gaze, and in the center of it was the smooth, scoured trace of an ancient waterfall. A terrific granite slope filled up one corner, between it and the side walls, and there were cracks in it and what looked like the shallow cuttings of stone steps, but the lowest edge of this was utterly inaccessible from below. The cliff dwellers probably reached it by systems of long, notched tree trunks, which the vicissitudes of ice, snow, rain and weather had long since rotted and crumbled to dust.
For him there was no way out—save by the cleft, the ledges, and the fir tree up which he had come! Sid stood there, staring blankly, sickened by the thought of that awful climb down. He knew well that it was impossible.
CHAPTER V
THE CLAWS OF THE BLACK PANTHER
RED JAKE and Scotty rode slowly to the left under the brow of the red butte, after Sid and Big John had started up the ravine for their deer. Scotty drew his .405 out of its saddle scabbard and rested it across his pommel as they approached a belt of scrub oak timber.
Red Jake eyed it quizzically. “I ain’t aimin’, no ways, to be introosive,” he drawled, “an’ I’ve kep’ my health by remainin’ strictly out of other folks’ business—but thar’s limits!” he grinned. “Which I’m burnin’ to find out, is thet thar cannon for shootin’ deer or elephants?”
Scotty flushed. “It’s all the gun I have,” he replied quietly. “She’s a bit heavy for deer, perhaps, but she was father’s old meat gun out in Montana. He left it to me.... A Hun shell killed him, in the Argonne,” added Scotty, his voice dropping over the remembrance.
“Shore, I’m sorry, kid!” came back Jake, extending a lean brown hand, all contrition. “We Arizonans has a pecooliar brand of humor with tender-feet—but we means well! Put her thar, Pal.”
He gripped Scotty’s hand warmly, and the beginning of a friendship established itself between them.